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MAKING ADVERTISEMENTS 
AND MAKING THEM PAY 



ADVERTISEMENT- 

To aO Gentlemen, BookfeHers, and others. 

At the Houfe with Stone-Step and $afbWind<ywt % 
in Hanover-Courr, in Grape-Streer, vulgarly 
caJtd Grub-Street* 

Liveth an AUTHOR, 

11THO Writeth all manner of Books and Paim 
* ' |>hlets, in Verfe or Profe, at Reafonablo 
Rates: And furni/hetb, at a Minute's Warning* 
any Cuftomer with Elegies, Paftorals, Epuhalami- 
ums, and Congratulatory Verfes adapted to all man* 
ncr of Perfons and ProfeiTions, ready written, with 
Blanks to infert the Names of the Parties Ad* 
drefs'd to. 

He fupplieth Gentlemen BelJ-JMen with Verfes 
on all Occafioni, at n d. the Dozen, or to*, the 
Grofs $ and teacheth them Accent and Pronuncia- 
tion gratis. 

He taketh any fide of a Queftion, and writeth 
for or againft, or both, if required. 

He likewrfe draws up Advertifements, and af- 
perfes after the neweft Method. 

He writeth for thofewho cannot write themfelves, 
yet are ambitious of being Authors $ and will, if 
requited, enter into Bonds never to own the Per- 
formance. 

He tranfmogrifieth, alias trammigrapheth any 
Copy j and maketh many Titles to one Work, 
after the manner of the famous Mr. J5— — C— *— 

N» B. He. is come down from the Garret to the firjl 
Floor % for the Convenience of his Cujlomers. 

tJ» Tray mt flake not the Houfe 5 Vecaufe there are 
many Pretenders thereabouts. 

No Truft by Retafe. 

Was he the first advertising agent? 



MAKING 
ADVERTISEMENTS 

And Making Them Pay 

BY 

Roy S. Durstine 



it 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1920 






Copyright, 1920, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



SEP 22 \\ 



THE SCRIBNER PRESS 



©CU576512 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Making an Advertisement i 

II. Which Comes First — Copy or Illustration? 17 

III. Getting Out of the Rut 37 

IV. Atmosphere 65 

V. Sincerity .' . 87 

VI. Common Sense 117 

VII. The Great Mystery — Merchandising . .131 

VIII. Lifting Dead Weight 155 

IX. The Right Word in the Right Place . . 175 

X. The Campaign 197 

XL Ideas on Idea Advertising .... 219 

XII. Where Is Advertising Going? .... 235 



MAKING AN ADVERTISEMENT 



I 

MAKING AN ADVERTISEMENT 

Advertising came into the world because 
men were too impatient to wait for Mrs. Jones to 
tell Mrs. Smith that Brown's pickles were good 
to eat. Brown discovered that he could tell two 
million Mrs. Smiths and Mrs. Joneses about his 
pickles and that he could sell a lot more pickles 
that way than by waiting for the news to leak 
out by itself. 

" But," said Brown's partner, " I believe in 
word-of-mouth advertising." 

" So do I," agreed Brown. " But it takes too 
long." 

" What I mean is this," his partner went on. 
" If Mrs. Jones tells Mrs. Brown, she'll believe 
it. If we tell her, she'll think we are trying to 
put something over." 

" That depends on how we tell her," said 
Brown. 

" Well," said his partner doubtfully, " we 
might get my nephew to write some advertise- 

3 



Making Advertisements 



ments for us. He's a clever boy. He used to 
write squibs for the high school paper." 

" But what makes you think he can write ad- 
vertisements? " 

" He's no good at anything else." 

" Say, listen! " Brown exclaimed. " There's 
more in this business of advertising than you 
think." 

" Shucks! Stringing sentences together and 
maybe finding somebody to draw a picture." 

" How do you suppose the pickle business 
looks from the outside? Putting young cucum- 
bers together in a glass jar and finding somebody 
to buy them 1 " 

" Oh, that's different," declared his partner. 

" So is advertising! I'm going to find some- 
body who knows as much about making adver- 
tisements as we know about making pickles. 
And then I'm going to get him to tell Mrs. 
Smith about our pickles so naturally that she 
will think Mrs. Jones is doing the talking. I'm 
sick of waiting. These talks over the back fence 
are all very well, but Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith 
are too busy these days to devote much time to 
gossiping about our pickles. And, besides, 
there are too blamed many back fences!" 



Making an Advertisement 



To judge by the looks of the magazines and 
newspapers, there must have been conversations 
of this sort in a great many factories in the past 
ten years. 

Never was there a year in which so many 
people have said, " Oh, are you in the advertis- 
ing business ? That must be fascinating work ! " 

Bright-eyed young men and women come into 
advertising agencies with letters of introduction 
and say they want to go into advertising. Some- 
times they want to work for nothing — " just to 
get started." Usually they call it a game — 
which it isn't. 

When you ask why they have selected the ad- 
vertising business, they usually have one or both 
of two reasons. First, it must be very interest- 
ing. They always have been students of adver- 
tising and they have written lots of advertise- 
ments themselves — just to compare with the 
ones in the magazines ; the inference being that 
they liked their own much better. 

Second, they understand that there is a great 
deal of money in advertising. When they are re- 
minded that there is also a great deal of money 
in engineering and insurance and medicine and 
store-keeping and any other business or profes- 



Making Advertisements 



sion in which a person gets a thorough training 
and works hard, then it appears that the re- 
wards in advertising apparently come more 
swiftly and with less effort. 

More swiftly, perhaps. For, unfortunately the 
time has not yet arrived when a regular course 
in college is assumed to be preliminary to ad- 
vertising as it is to medicine, the law and the 
ministry, and as it is coming to be to architecture 
and accounting. There are already a number 
of courses in advertising, ranking high in edu- 
cational value, but too few aspirants take ad- 
vantage of them. They prefer to go into adver- 
tising through the employees' entrance of an 
agency or of a manufacturer's advertising de- 
partment. And though the entrance may be 
swift, progress is often too slow for lack of a 
grasp of what the business is all about. 

But, however swiftly rewards may come, they 
do not arrive without effort. And if there is 
any purpose in this book it is merely to give some 
idea of what happens in advertising beside 
" stringing sentences together and finding some- 
body to draw a picture." 

It is easy to understand the increased interest 
in advertising in the past few years. Never was 



3? 



N. 



lews 

WHAT is news? 

Some think news is just infor- 
mation about the outside world. 

But advertising, too, is news. 

It is information that may be 
of personal moment. 

A paper without advertising 
is but half a newspaper. 

Marshall Field & Company 
advertisements bear the value of 
news. 

MARSHA1L FIELD 
©COMPANY 



// you don't believe that people regard advertising as news, watch your 
wife read next Sunday's newspapers. The merchants of the country have 
come to realize that they must make their advertising as truthful and as in- 
teresting as any other part of the paper. For it is business news. 



8 Making Advertisements 

there a time when advertising has advertised 
advertising so effectively. The very volume of 
it has been insistent and impressive. People 
who never have spoken about it, who perhaps 
have not been conscious of advertising ever be- 
fore in their lives, are commenting on the amount 
of advertising that comes to them with their 
reading matter. Today more and more people 
are admitting, though sometimes still reluc- 
tantly, that advertising has changed their habits. 

A few years ago it was common to hear a man 
boast that advertising had never sold him any- 
thing. Inquiry probably would have developed 
that he was awakened by a Big Ben, shaved him- 
self with a Gillette, brushed his teeth with a Pro- 
phylactic tooth brush, put on his B. V. D.'s, his 
Holeproof s, Regal shoes, E. & W. collar and Ar- 
row shirt, and had Kellogg's corn flakes, Beech- 
nut bacon, and Yuban coffee sweetened with 
Domino sugar, for breakfast. And then — but 
why pursue him further on his trade-marked 
way? Of course advertising never sold him any- 
thing! 

The only man who can say that advertising 
doesn't sell him anything these days is one who 
shuts himself up in a cage in the heart of an 



Making an Advertisement 



African jungle. And even he would probably 
find that most of his camping supplies were ad- 
vertised products. 

Advertising's part in the war has had much to 
do with the increased interest in it. People 
could look around them and see how they and 
their friends were eating less and saving more, 
changing their habits of working, buying, dress- 
ing, living and even thinking, all because of ad- 
vertising. They became intimately acquainted 
with nations whose names weren't in the old 
geographies. America's provincialism was 
broken down. 

At least three other factors, comparatively 
slight in themselves, perhaps, but forceful, have 
had a part in bringing advertising forward. 
Artists whose names are widely known as illus- 
trators of stories and originators of magazine 
covers have been put to work by advertisers al- 
ways seeking to improve their advertisements. 
People have recognized their work and have 
commented upon it. That has been a factor. 

Then, advertising representatives have cov- 
ered the field of manufactured products so inten- 
sively in the past few years that a very large 
number of business men have heard the story of 



io Making Advertisements 

advertising applied to their own businesses, at 
first hand. 

And a third factor, perhaps, has been the 
greater amount of advertising about advertising 
— campaigns in the leading newspapers by 
agencies who believe in it so much that they take 
their own medicine, and such broad-gauged, far- 
sighted campaigns as the publishers have spon- 
sored. 

But of course the greatest reason has been 
simply this : Industry has faced the problem of 
getting back to a peace basis as rapidly and eco- 
nomically as possible. Merchandise has been 
produced in greater volume than was ever 
dreamed. As a nation we have set for our- 
selves new standards of volume and quality in 
production. Trade channels half filled by 
the silt of war had to be dredged for the naviga- 
tion of business. Advertising was the steam 
shovel. 

Many trade-marks were kept before the pub- 
lic even when their owners had nothing to sell in 
wartime, and now the keen judgment of those 
who regarded advertising as insurance is being 
rewarded. But a greater number were allowed 
to drop out of sight. Dealers took up other 



Where the word 
"Victrola" came from 

The word "Victrola" was made up by com* 
bining a portion of the word Victor with a 
portion of the word "viola". 

It was originated and trade-marked for the 
specific purpose of distinguishing products of 
the Victor Talking Machine Company. 

The word "Victrola" is a trademark fully 
protected by registration in the United States 
Patent Office* Its use or application to other 
than Victor products is not only misleading, 
hut it is against the law* 

VICTROLA 




Victor Talking Machine Company 

Camden, New Jersey 



The word Victrola is a name which the powerful advertising of F. Wallis 
Armstrong has made invulnerable. 



12 Making Advertisements 

lines. And the rush back to the good will of the 
trade and the public has been inevitable and the 
shortest cut has been — as it always will be — 
through advertising. 

The man who makes a reliable product, who 
has an adequate sales force capable of putting 
his merchandise into the hands of dealers every- 
where — such a man knows that his sale is not 
completed until he has made room on the retail 
merchants' shelves for more merchandise from 
the factory. 

Eventually the public will buy a good product 
even without advertising. But most American 
business men are not content to wait. They pre- 
fer to invest their own money in telling the pub- 
lic why their merchandise is good. They know 
that if they tell their story simply, truthfully, 
naturally, they will do a much greater volume of 
business than they would if they kept quiet. 
And they know that their printed messages to 
the public are the most important phase of their 
public relations. 

For no matter how smoothly their channels 
of distribution may be arranged, no matter how 
attractive their sales policy may be to retail 
merchants, if the public isn't interested and con- 



Making an Advertisement 13 

vinced by their advertisements, their advertising 
falls short. 

These are the really significant reasons for the 
increased volume of advertising. But there is 
another cause which has received attention out 
of all proportion to its actual importance, par- 
ticularly from people who pride themselves on 
their own astuteness and are always quick to be- 
lieve that somebody is trying to put something 
over. That is the idea that the gain is caused by 
the excess profits tax; that an advertiser prefers 
to put into advertising a great share of what he 
would otherwise have to pay in taxes. 

No doubt there are advertisers who have been 
impelled by this motive, just as there are prob- 
ably advertisers who have lavished unnecessary 
improvements upon their plants simply to get a 
run for their money. 

But to say that the increase in advertising is 
caused by the tax alone is as absurd as it is un- 
just to the advertising business. The advertis- 
ing man who would urge the tax as a reason for 
advertising would be in the position of the un- 
dertaker who urged a friend to smoke himself 
to death in order to collect enough coupons to 
get a coffin. 



14 Making Advertisements 

No doubt there will soon be advertisers who, 
either through their own mistaken ideas of econ- 
omy or through unwise advice, will presently 
emerge from a headlong advertising campaign 
only to discover that advertising does not pay. 
They will be the ones who spent money for ad- 
vertising without regard for the proper safe- 
guards of production, distribution and market- 
ing methods. 

Yet even these advertisers will probably be 
forced to admit that even their extravagant and 
ungoverned way of advertising has left for them 
a residue of good will and enhanced respect 
which they have never felt before. And a cer- 
tain number of these plungers will take a lesson 
from their experience; they will say to them- 
selves that if such senseless advertising as they 
have used can prove its value, there must be some- 
thing in it after all — something which they never 
suspected when they decided to have their fling 
and let the publisher pay the piper. In these 
cases, the net of an advertising debauch will be the 
creation of a few rational advertisers, after all. 

There will be another worth while effect, too. 
Suppose, in a certain line of business, only one 
manufacturer takes the spendthrift attitude to- 



Making an Advertisement 15 

ward advertising. When his competitors see 
that his advertising appropriation is suddenly 
expanding, they too will be apt to put on added 
pressure. 

But not being the spendthrift type, they will 
increase more cautiously and with better judge- 
ment. So the effect will he that their advertising 
development will be quickened and they will be 
much further along the road to success than they 
would have been if their joy-riding competitor 
had not administered an artificial stimulus. 

At its worst, therefore, this tax phase of adver- 
tising will unquestionably create many sound 
new advertisers who never would have known 
advertising's advantages if it had not been for 
this rapid though questionable introduction to it. 

But it should be remembered that this whole 
discussion of the relation of the tax to advertis- 
ing is almost entirely confined to the amateur 
advertiser and to those who are entirely unac- 
quainted with the advertising business. Among 
ethical advertising men who are looking at busi- 
ness in terms of the future and at advertising as 
a constructive force, nothing could be more sui- 
cidal than recommending the unrestrained ex- 
penditure of large sums which could not pos- 



1 6 Making Advertisements 

sibly show a proper return. No matter what 
the original incentive, whether it is saving 
money or making sales or making good will, 
when his advertising appropriation is once spent 
an advertiser invariably looks around him and 
asks, " What did I get for my money? " And 
he is entitled to know and to have something to 
see. 

Realizing this and appreciating, too, that the 
unwise spending of money under any pretext is 
opposed to the permanent good of advertising, 
the farsighted men of the business have consist- 
ently refused to help the tax-evader and have 
discouraged his destructive plans wherever op- 
portunity offered. 



II 

WHICH COMES FIRST — COPY 
OR ILLUSTRATION? 



II 

WHICH COMES FIRST — COPY 
OR ILLUSTRATION? 

When you see an advertisement in a magazine 
or newspaper, you see a finished product — like 
a building or a play. The better it is, the less it 
shows the preliminary steps involved in makingit. 

You have seen buildings which seemed to cry 
out that their builders changed their minds a 
dozen times in the course of construction. You 
have watched plays where the mechanism 
creaked so audibly that one of the characters 
might as well have said : " I know I'm acting con- 
trary to all human standards, but the author can 
unravel the plot in no other way." 

Similarly you have seen advertisements in 
which the picture, type and copy should have 
been granted an absolute divorce on the grounds 
of incompatibility. 

As you go along the streets of a strange city 
you find yourself looking twice at certain build- 
ings. After a winter's theatre-going you look 

19 




WIRE 

The nation's business is transacted over millions of miles of wire. The 
New Jersey Zinc Company plays its part in maintaining this won- 
derful equipment, for it is New Jersey Zinc that protects these wires 
from rusting and breaking and prevents a prohibitive replacement cost. 

This Zinc, (commercially called spelter), is but one of this com- 
pany's many products. All are vitally essential to many of the 
nation's greatest industries. 

The New Jersey Zinc Company by reason of the location of its zinc 
deposits, the quality of its ore, the modern equipment of its many 
plants, and the extent of its resources, can be depended upon for ex- 
ceptional service and unvarying quality in every one of its products. 

THE NEW JERSEY ZINC COMPANY, SS Wall W, New Yo* 

ESTABLISHED MM 

CHICAGO. Hiunl Point Zinc Coupvijr. 1111 KuqueU* Buildiaf, 

iiamfacainri ./ TJnt Oxidi. Sftlur, SpUpkilr*. Lilkpnu, Sulfiuri, Joi. 

Znt Slrifi mi Pkui, Zint DwioJZim Chbridt 

Th* world'! ttandard for Zinc product, 



fewjersej^ 

zinc 



Zinc is a thing which the public never buys — consciously. Yet by selling 
the use of zinc in wire and paint and other finished products, a new appre- 
ciation of this metal has been built up by Calkins £s? Holden for the New 
Jersey Zinc Company. This is the highest type of "institutional" adver- 
tising. Compare it to the old kind which attempted to create an impression 
of stability and size by showing the chimneys of the plant and the whiskers 
of the founder. 



First, Copy or Illustration ? 21 

back at certain plays with a wistful impression 
that you would like to see them again. You 
might find it difficult to explain just why. But 
occasionally you see a play or a building or an 
advertisement which is so well proportioned, so 
satisfying in design and mood and technique, so 
right in its completeness as a unit, that it fills 
your eye and warms your heart. 

Clearly, since these are the objects of all ad- 
vertisements, it may be useful to speculate over 
the ways that this unity can be obtained. 

After the fire of London, when the task of re- 
building confronted the city, some one had the 
happy idea of permitting Sir Christopher Wren 
to take command of the situation. And even 
though not all of his plans were carried out, Lon- 
don is a unit as compared with, say, the 
cloak-and-suit school of architecture in the 
cross-streets of Manhattan just south of Fortieth 
and north of Twenty-third. 

If one person can visualize an advertisement 
before a line of copy is written or drawn, a 
mighty step toward unity has been taken. 

Many careful workmen among advertising 
men find that they get the best results if they can 
follow this course : 



PREFERRED 



AS THEN 




JJU, Ml. ' . 

" ... In those days it teas no uncommon sight to see the Statesmen, dur- 
ing a recess, discussing Ways and Means over their Virginia cigarettes," 

These famous cigarettes have always been in demand. And fortunately 
for you, they're not imported. Their good Virginia tobacco is grown right 
here — it pays no import duty —all the value in ""Richmond Straight Cuts" 
is in the cigarette, where it should be. If you don't know the old-time deli- 
cacy of good Virginia tobacco — you should try "Richmond Straight Cuts." 



Richmond StraiditGit 

CIGARETTES <?laino?Cbrk<lip 

In Neat Boxes— Fifteen Cents 

Also in attractive fins, SO for 40 cents; 100 for 75 
cents. Sent Prepaid if jour dealer Cannot supply you. 



ftKHMONft.VmM»u4ltA- 



Every element in this series was in character — copy, illustration, type 
and border. Even the captions carried out the quaintness of the whole effect. 
Courtland N. Smith, now of Joseph Richards Co., Inc., put thought into 
this series — and it was worth it. 



First, Copy or Illustration ? 23 

After they have their material in hand, after 
the purpose of the advertisement has been settled, 
they carry the idea of it around in their minds for 
a few days without trying to crystallize it into 
a definite advertisement. Little by little it be- 
gins to take shape. Perhaps the headline comes 
first — a short line or a whole sentence. Then 
the spirit of the whole advertisement, the at- 
mosphere of it, gradually visualizes itself — a 
strong, vigorous treatment or a clean-cut, com- 
paratively light appearance. 

Several arrangements suggest themselves im- 
mediately if the visualizer has a natural or a 
trained imagination. Usually a conscientious 
person isn't satisfied to stop at the first ideas that 
occur to him. 

At this stage, still before anything has been 
written, it is often useful to sit down with pencil 
and paper and play with ideas. Even though he 
may not be able to draw at all, he can make min- 
iature designs of pages which will convey, at 
least to himself, an idea of how several possibil- 
ities would work out. 

By this time his plans begin to narrow down. 
He begins to see roughly how his advertisement 
will look. A definite conception of the layout 



6&&£££A&&&&&&&&&&£.&,& 



Richmond StraightGut 

CIGARETTES Wain or Cork <fy 




. . even th» tophomore* treated me with tome respect when J pro- 
duced the Virginia cigarette* uhich I'd brought upfront Riehmond.' 

That fine old Southern Aristocrat— "Richmond 
Straight Cuts." There's never been another cigarette 
quite like them. Their "bright" Virginia tobacco 
has a naturally refreshing flavor that makes even the 
best of Turkish cigarettes taste almost tame and character- 
less by contrast. You'll wish you'd tried them before. 



Also packed in attractive tins. 50 for 40 
cents: 100 for 75 cents. Sent prepaid 
if your dealer cannot supply you. 



J&ltot fyHjtV*) | 



NOTE: Unlik* Turkish tobacco. Virginia tobacoo 
pays no import duty— all the value in Richmond 
Straight Cut cigarettes is in their choice Virginia 
tobacco. 




"PREFERRED by GENTLEMEN NOW as THEN 



The picture belongs with the copy and the copy belongs with the type and 
all three belong to the product in these advertisements. Mr. Smith caught 
the spirit of the cigarettes and the advertiser had the good sense to let him 
express it. 



First, Copy or Illustration ? 25 



is in his mind. Names of artists and recollec- 
tions of their work will begin to occur to him. 
He will see just about how much he can write — 
whether he can develop his argument fully or 
must remember to hit out with short, strong 
sentences. 

Some men's minds work in terms of layouts, 
some only in terms of copy — and some appar- 
ently do not work at all. But if the combina- 
tion of layout and copy can progress together in 
this way the result will have a much greater 
chance of being a unit. 

There is a famous magazine illustrator who 
laughs because people often ask him which 
come first — his pictures or the stories they il- 
lustrate. He patiently explains that there can't 
be any illustrations until there is something to 
illustrate. By the same token there can't be a 
picture for an advertisement until there is an 
advertisement that needs a picture. 

The disadvantages of having the advertise- 
ment originate with a man who only writes copy 
or with a man who only makes layouts are man- 
ifest. And yet when you glance through the 
advertising pages you see that many advertise- 
ments are made in this one-handed way. That 



26 Making Advertisements 

is one reason that many of them have a splendid 
illustration, a good display of the name and 
trade-mark and about six times as much copy 
as anybody will read. 

An art director has made a layout. In his de- 
sign he has inserted a small block of horizontal 
lines on which he has lettered " Copy Here." 
Off in the other end of the office a copy man has 
received a requisition for seven or twelve ad- 
vertisements. He has written them to suit his 
arguments. And then some poor typographer 
has to try to squeeze a three-hundred word prose- 
poem into a 3 x 2 space. Perhaps he may have 
the hardihood to send it back with a polite re- 
quest to cut about half of the copy. Then the 
copy man either jumps up and down, and kicks 
the waste basket, or sends it back to be set in 8- 
point type, depending on the relative impor- 
tance of the copy man and the type man. 

Or, a copy man has worked out a series of ad- 
vertisements, thinking only of his arguments and 
caring not at all about the layout. Eventually 
they arrive on the art director's desk crying to 
be illustrated. Perhaps they do not offer the 
slightest basis for illustration. He sees this at 
once, but he knows that if he says so, the copy 



First, Copy or Illustration ? 27 

man is very likely to ask him where he ever got 
the idea that he knew anything about copy. So 
he falls back on the time-tried expedient of hav- 
ing Mrs. Housewife saying something to Mr. 
Dealer. 

And in either case the typographer stands be- 
tween two fires, vainly wishing that type were 
made of rubber instead of hard, remorseless 
metal. 

Even if a maker of advertisements finds by ex- 
perience that either the copy or layout side of 
his brain sags too much to permit his imagina- 
tion to progress along parallel lines, at least he 
can call for help before it is too late. He can 
talk things over with a man who thinks in terms 
of layouts if his own mind runs to copy. He 
can ask his typographer how many words of a 
certain size type will comfortably fit into a 
given space. And then when the advertisement is 
complete its parts will look as if they were meant 
to belong together instead of being coerced by a 
perspiring compositor with strong wrists. 

All this is not for purposes of art for art's 
sake. That, of course, is an excellent idea, for 
any conscientious workman prefers to do a work- 
manlike piece of work rather than a slovenly job. 



28 Making Advertisements 

But the primary object of this unity is to make 
the advertisement pay. 

A well-proportioned, carefully-made adver- 
tisement pays better than a crowded, carelessly 
made advertisement just as a good piece of archi- 
tecture appeals to ignorant and educated alike, 
just as a good play succeeds because it is well 
done. 

This does not mean the meticulousness that 
seeks merely to produce a choice design. Some 
of the most exquisite pieces of type arrangement 
and design — exquisite as designs — will abso- 
lutely defy the most persistent efforts to read 
them. Those who feel or affect abandoned 
pleasure in viewing specimens of this work may 
gather around and sigh, if they will, like the 
disciples of the latest freak among painters. But 
next year there will be a new freak, and the type 
design made purely for its own sake does not 
come under the head of advertising. 

Like everything else designed to be read, an 
advertisement is an intrusion. " You have been 
told, I daresay often enough," says Sir Arthur 
Quiller-Couch, " that the business of writing de- 
mands two — the author and the reader. Add 
to this what is equally obvious, that the obliga- 



c 7ht World and His Wife 



The World is hard to please — even harder than 
his wife. There are many . things fashioned to 
gladden the heart of woman. Her clothes, her 
jewelry, all her personal possessions may be just 
as full of life and color as she desires. 



The World does not fare so well. Each genera* 
tion has decreed that his clothing must be in- 
creasingly sombre. His tastes, too, are more sim- 
ple and his concrete wants are fewer. Display of 
any sort, b not considered "good form." 

So when it comes to choosing a gift for the 
World, it is necessary to use much care. Let us 
help you with this gift problem. We have given 
a great deal of study to things we offer as suit* 
able gifts for father, brother, and husband. 

We have pipes, cigarette cases, and humidors 
for the smoker. Our sets of studs and sleeve links 
are full of quiet elegance. We have walking sticks 
and umbrellas imported from London. Watches 
of all the best American and foreign makes we 
will gladly regulate to keep perfect time for the 



Shreve, Crump and Low Company 

ftMMfS/fOO 

Watches, Fine Clocks, Stationery, Traveling Requisite* 
U7 Tremont Street Boston, Massachusetts 



C"!'.S.C.*l.C<>. 



Even the merchandise has been brought into harmony with the copy and 
the design in this admirable advertisement. By George Batten Co. 



30 Making Advertisements 

tion of courtesy rests first with the author, who 
invites the seance, and commonly charges for it. 
What follows, but that in speaking or writing we 
have an obligation to put ourselves into the hear- 
er's or reader's place? It is his comfort, his 
convenience, we have to consult. To express 
ourselves is a very small part of the business; 
very small and almost unimportant as compared 
with impressing ourselves, the aim of the whole 
process being to persuade. 

" All reading demands an effort. The energy, 
the good-will which a reader brings to the book 
is, and must be, partly expended in the labor of 
reading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting 
what the author means. The more difficulties, 
then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or 
careless writing, the more we blunt the edge of 
his attention; so that if only in our own interest 
— though I had rather keep it on the ground of 
courtesy — we should study to anticipate his 
comfort." 

Charging for the seance is only another way 
of saying that an advertisement exists to sell 
something. So obviously the process of intrud- 
ing must be arranged as effectively as possible. 
And in this the two elements which can help 
most are the picture and the headline. 



First, Copy or Illustration? 31 

Possibly the best rule to follow in an illustra- 
tion is to be sure that it tells a story. If the ex- 
planation can be thrown away it is a mighty good 
picture. But sometimes there is unfortunately 
no story to tell in the picture, if the artist can 
judge by the copy furnished to him. He is then 
in the position of the actor who was confronted 
with carrying out that famous stage direction 
in an eminent British playwright's drama — the 
one which says, " Enter in the manner of one 
who has just had a cup of tea." 

So he does his best to decorate the advertise- 
ment instead of illustrating it. His decoration 
may be effective, but at best all it can hope to 
accomplish is to shout to the public: " Come 
and read this! I don't know what it's all 
about, but I'm here to catch your eye, so look this 
way! " 

Or he may play safe and draw that picture of 
Mrs. Housewife and Mr. Dealer, or the crowd 
out at the country club, or the family at dinner, or 
the factory beside a winding river, or two men 
talking across a desk, or the bride doing her 
housework, or any other one of the good old 
dependable subjects that have advertised every- 
thing from food to fashion. If a picture is 



32 Making Advertisements 

going to tell a story, why not have it tell just one 
story instead of a whole news-stand? 

Ordinarily a safe plan to follow in creating 
interest by an illustration is to show the product 
in action. The motor truck tire crunching 
through the mud and leaving the track of its 
tread was infinitely more interesting than a cold 
picture of a tire floating in space would have 
been. If you are selling aeroplanes, it 's ob- 
vious that a picture of a plane leaving the 
ground, or making a flight or landing, would 
create more interest than a portrait of a station- 
ary plane. In the same way it's more interest- 
ing to show a suite of furniture in a room, with 
pictures, hangings and ornaments, than to show 
merely a table and some chairs. If you are ad- 
vertising a newspaper, show it being read by 
somebody. Every piece of merchandise is de- 
signed to fill a need. Show it on the job — in 
action — satisfying the need it comes to fill. It 
simply means making your product fit into the 
scheme of human events. 

There is always something exciting about a 
piece of merchandise that lends itself to a cen- 
tral, individual idea. " See that hump? " made 
one hook-and-eye stand out above all others for 




Symphony in B Quiet — 

Some bright soul has called the 
typewriter The Word Piano. 

The beauty of the Noiseless 
Typewriter is that it does its work 
—pianissimo! 

You may have a full orchestra of 
Noiseless Typewiters in your office 
but they never disturb. 

Quiet reigns supreme. The irri- 
tating brass-band-jazz fades into 
a lullaby. To install the Noiseless 
Aikfw is like having the hurdy-gurdy 

Boom and move away from your window 
iSTSLn on a busy day. 

* NOISELESS 

TYPEWRITER 

The Noiseless Typewriter Company, 253 Broadway, New York 
'Phone *Barclay8205 



Business is a serious subject, and for that very reason the best way to talk 
about it is with a smile. It's the best way because most people don't do it. 
How much more interesting is this type of copy prepared by N. W. Ayer & 
Son than the conventional "Now listen , Mr. Purchasing Agent!" 



34 Making Advertisements 

a generation. Take the revolver that can be 
hammered without going off, the table varnish 
that thrives under a shower of boiling water, the 
motor car which has no gears to shift, the soap 
that lathers well in cold water, the cigarette that 
won't bite and the hack-saw that will, the muci- 
lage that sticks and the motor-oil that doesn't — 
all these have succeeded in getting themselves 
associated with definite, individual ideas. 

Then the way is opened for a good headline 
which can sum up the whole argument with in- 
terest, vividness and force. A poor one can be 
merely dull — or misleading, like the kind 
which says, " Columbus discovered America. 
Have you discovered this new oleomargarine? " 
If it fails to attract attention, or attracts it under 
false pretenses, the headline might better be left 
out. 

The making of the advertisement which is to 
appear before the public is the most important 
thing in advertising because the advertisement 
is usually the only thing the public sees before it 
buys, and is always your surest way of conveying 
to your customers your own idea of your business 
as you know it. 

Take the best trade investigation ever made. 



First, Copy or Illustration ? 35 

Take the best window displays and the most 
carefully drilled lot of salesmen on earth, set the 
stage to perfection and then tell the consumer a 
dreary, commonplace story and what does he get 
out of it? A dreary, commonplace story. 
That's all he sees ! You can't go to him and say, 
" Yes, but you ought to see how well we make 
our merchandise." What does he care? He's 
off buying that other product to which the ad- 
vertising attracted him. 

Make your trade plans right, of course. Set 
your house in order with your salesmen and your 
dealers. Let them all understand just how you 
plan to advertise and where they fit in. But be- 
fore that and after that and all the time in be- 
tween make sure that your consumer copy is so 
unified, so representative of you, and so sincere 
that it will surge back at you like a living thing. 



Ill 

GETTING OUT OF THE RUT 



Ill 

GETTING OUT OF THE RUT 

One of the greatest shortcomings of today's 
advertising is its rubber-stampism. Too many 
advertisements are so commonplace that almost 
any name could be signed to them. More than 
that, in most cases it would not be necessary to 
limit the choice of signers to any single line of 
business. 

"I want my advertising to reflect my com- 
pany so exactly," says the advertiser, " that it 
will fit my company and no other." 

And what does he get? Advertisements 
which look and sound so much like other adver- 
tisements, already appearing, that you could re- 
move his name and substitute his competitor's 
without disturbing the effect a particle. Yes, 
you could even go into another industry without 
introducing a discordant note. Right here will 
come a protest from those who spend their days 
in the service of reflecting other men's busi- 
nesses. 

39 



40 Making Advertisements 

" That's all very well," they will exclaim, 
" but when there isn't a shred of individuality 
about a business, what are you going to do 
then? " 

Well, advertising, despite its close relation to 
many kinds of business, is only one business, 
after all. And for the purposes of this discussion 
it is much more feasible to speak of individuality 
in advertising than to advance theories for indi- 
vidualities in all businesses. Without question 
it would be desirable to see every business house 
achieve a personality of its own. Most of them 
have one already if the search is carried deep 
enough. But to suggest ways of accomplishing 
this would be a reasonably large order. It's 
quite enough, here and now, to limit the discus- 
sion to advertising's ways of seeking out and ex- 
pressing the individualities which already exist. 

Is there any reason why nine out of ten jew- 
elry establishments should have advertisements 
which are so alike in border, in design of type, 
in phrasing, that you could lay your hand over 
the signature and defy any one to tell you the 
name of the signer? Is there any reason for the 
pompous formula of so-called " institutional " 
advertising — the picture of the plant or of the 



Li Hung Chang 

Li Hung Chang declined to 
go to the races because he said 
it was already established 
thatonehorsecouldrunfaster 
than another. Why should 
a man look at machine-made 
clothes when he can be hand 
tailored forthesamemoney? 

MEN'S SUITS $30 TO $65 
TOPCOATS $30 TO $65 
HAND-TAILORED AND READY 




FIFTH AVENUE 

Men's Clothing Shops, 8 West 38th Street 

LOCATED ON STREET LEVEL 



Another instance of the way that Frank Irving Fletcher constantly enriches 
his copy by introducing interesting gossip. 



42 Making Advertisements^ 

founder or both, at the top ; the solemn and res- 
onant paragraphs protesting of the house's virtue 
and long years of faithful service to the Ameri- 
can people? Switch the signature and all these 
handsome tributes to themselves might be spoken 
equally well by makers of condensed milk or 
automobile tires or baked beans or paint or men's 
clothing or any other houses with long and hon- 
orable histories dating back to an incorporation 
prior to 1900. 

No ; the trouble is deeper-rooted than a firm's 
thoughtlessness in failing to provide itself with 
points of distinction. Suppose we construct a 
rubber-stamp piece of copy and then call in the 
house-wreckers : 

Your grandmother 
didn't know any better ! 

Think of the hours your grandmother used to 
waste in . . . ! She didn't know any other way. But 
you do. 

You can be free, forever, free from the drudgery 
of ... . Every day can be made longer. You can 
do your .... better than ever before and still have 
plenty of time for reading, calling, shopping and the 
movies. 

The simple principle of this device permits you to 
do more .... with less effort in shorter time at lower 




I know a banker— 

(purely in a social way.) 



"TIM," he laid to m< the other day, "I'm really 
I just aa human as any other man but my pro- 
fession calls for conservatism. People are nervous 
when it comes to entrusting their money to other* 
and H gives them confidence to discover in ua 
banker* a reverence for the hallowed customs of 
the past." 

• I had been tryirrg to persuade him to give up his 
silver shaving mug and get radical in the privacy of 
his bathroom by trying Mennen Shaving Cream. 

I met him again next day. "You win, Jim," he 
•aid. "I used Mennen's this morning. Neverhad 
such a shave in my life. My shaving mug now 
belongs to the janitor." 

It's the first trial of Mennen's tha^ startles you. 
After you have used it for a few months you forget 
the old fashioned soap with its thin, watery lather 
that used to drizzle off the end of your chin into 
the cuff of your pajamas -and darken your whole 
outlook on life. 

But the first Mennen shave Is a revelation- 
Just a half inch of cream blossoms into billows of 
creamy lather as light and firm as beaten white* 
of eggs and full of moisture as a fog bank. You 
work this lather in with the brush for three 
minutes-*and then— say, I never have found the 
word* to express a man's emotion the first time he 



draw* a razor down through a mask of Menntn'i 
lather. The board simply ian'i there J 

Afterwards your face feels like that of a kid'* 
who has just come out of the swimmin g hole— *ort 
of bright and easy to twiat into a smile.. 

Anyway, it wouldn't break you banker* to try 
a tube. youn faithfully. 



ft Me««a<taaaa W 




Jim Henry says: 

"A lot of us smooth shaven young fellows could raise gray beards 1 



You could look through many magazines for many nights without find- 
ing another series of such persuasive, man-to-man, entertaining copy as 
Wilbur Corman and Jim Adams, between them, have created for Jim Henry. 



44 Making Advertisements 

cost. Your little girl can understand it; that's how 
simple it is! In thousands of homes children are 
now doing all the .... better and more economically 
than their mothers did in the old, laborious way. 

Send your name to us on a postcard and you will 
receive our newest booklet, " How to Make .... a 
Pleasure," illustrated in four colors. Send today! 

Here the dashes represent almost anything 
from baking to washing dishes, from sewing to 
cleaning. Change the gender and a word here 
and there, and you have an advertisement for 
any new office appliance. The form is chosen 
because housekeeping and office-keeping em- 
brace nearly all of both sexes' waking hours. 

It's all the fault of the outrageous person who 
first boiled down advertising to this formula: 
First, focus the attention; second, interest the 
reader; third, create a desire; fourth, show that 
you satisfy that desire; fifth, stimulate action. 

There it all is, in the hideous piece of copy 
which we constructed. For easy reference the 
five steps have been taken paragraph by para- 
graph — one step to a paragraph. 

And what do we get? Obviously, an adver- 
tisement which could be made to fit almost any 
product under the sun. Extreme? Don't you 
believe it. Turn to the advertising pages of the 



Getting Out of the Rut 45 

nearest magazine or the advertising columns of 
the handiest newspaper. 

A very amusing article called " Ready-Write 
Paragraphs, Inc." by P. K. Marsh appeared in 
Printers' Ink in the issue of October 23, 1919. 
The author calls it " a new service for over- 
worked or underpowered copy-carpenters " — 
and it certainly is. He says that his " reading 
of the more expensive of advertising pages dis- 
closed a surprising condition — advertisement 
after advertisement could be applied to any type 
of merchandise merely by the simple expedient 
of changing the trade-name and signature. 

" Instantly my agile mind leaped to the paral- 
lel — motion-studies in industrial production 
had led to a science of l Efficiency,' and effi- 
ciency-experts are making fat fees from coast to 
coast. How? Largely by standardizing their 
findings. 

" Then the same agile mind leaped again to a 
book I had once found in a second-hand book 
shop — ' The Ready Letter-Writer.' 

" My idea was complete — sprung full-grown 
from the brain of Jove. 

" All over the nation there are harassed copy- 
writers, advertising managers appointed by re- 



46 Making Advertisements 

lationship rather than by experience, and copy- 
cubs aspiring to loftier salaries — there stood 
my potential market, vast, receptive, unsated." 

For these harassed writers he purposed to is- 
sue ready-made paragraphs, suitable for use un- 
der practically all conditions. For example: 

" Paragraph 26 — * The thousands of satisfied 
carpenters using . . . are their best indorse- 
ment.' 

" Note : — For carpenters substitute your par- 
ticular type of purchaser. Though this may 
strike a novice in advertising as inconclusive in 
argument and highly sketchy in appeal, it is 
good copy because it cost the first user $250 a 
word. 

" Paragraph 40 — c Uninterrupted and eco- 
nomical performance is the direct result of high 
standard of manufacture and concentration upon 
one product for many years.' 

"Note: — A particularly choice paragraph 
for agency work as it applies to practically any- 
thing of a utilitarian nature. Caution — use a 
strong layout. 

" Paragraph S3 — '. . . popularity is based 
not on any one quality, but on an all-round de- 
sirability which omits no essential of satisfaction. 



Getting Out of the Rut 47 

The . . . itself pleases the eye; its perform- 
ance and economy of operation confirm the good 
judgment of the purchaser.' 

" Note : — No. 53 must be used with more 
caution than some of the others. ' Economy of 
operation ' may, as needed, be replaced with 
* unusual endurance/ ' dependable results ' or 
other appealing generality." 

But would he use his ready-made paragraphs 
to advertise his ready-made paragraphs? Not 
much! Here is the sort of copy he says he 
would use : 

When Inspiration fails you, rely on R. W. P. 

When your Esterbrook ceases brooking, when 
your Conklin fails to conk, that's when a fellow needs 
a friend. 

When Jimmy-pipes are unavailing, when Camels 
flunk, when you haven't an idea worth its area in 
scratch-paper because you've written the whole 
darned subject dry — then you need R. W. P. 

Why? Because, waiting for you in the R. W. P. 
binder is an ad already made, merely waiting for you 
to insert the name of your particular product. 

And every R. W. P. ad is a good ad, sure to pass 
the copy-chief and the Big Man in your client's or- 
ganization. How do we know? Because every ad 
has passed our unique sure-fire $2,000 Test. 
There's not a dud in the whole arsenal. Get our 
special group offer for agency copy-departments. 



48 Making Advertisements 

More power to Mr. Marsh and to Printers' 
Ink whose editors have had the good sense to 
print many of his readable jolts to the compla- 
cent copy world ! 

The difficulty is that the person creating and 
authorizing advertisements is too often what 
H. L. Mencken calls " an absolutely typical 
American of the transition stage between Chris- 
tian Endeavor and civilization." 

Gen^rically he is first of all a worshiper of 
property. He is awed in the presence of sales 
reports, or capitalizations running into eight fig- 
ures. Acres of factory floor space make his eyes 
glisten. 

Similarly, he venerates success for itself alone. 
Stories of young men who in seven years have 
gone from auditor to president — adult versions 
of the Pluck-and-Luck school of Frank Merri- 
well — warm his heart. He has little attention 
for the patient study and constant striving which 
achieved that success; he sees only the result. 
To him there is really no such thing as business 
democracy; it is an autocracy of earning power; 
you fawn upon those who make more than you 
do and bully those who make less. That's his 
code of business manners. 








Yes, I'm a Nut 


When the English people heard Stephenson's 
idea of a wagon on rails pushed by steam they 


jy^jyOME people say I am a nut about making 


laughed their heads off. But Stephenson kept on 




and new no one knows what McAdoo'll do next 


|BWJ| hiffp* prwr^r* 


Everybody takes a Kodak with them because 


All right. I am a nut 


Eastman was a nut 


But I am in pretty good company. 


Duryea was a nut and now the automobile 


The record of the nuts up to date runs high. 


industry is the third largest in the country. 


Archimedes was a nut, but you can't hoist a 


Ford was a nut — and is yet 


derrick' to-day without Archie's help. He was the. 
fellow who slid: "just give me standing room for 


So, if I am a nut I am rather proud of it 


my lever, and I'll pry up the universe." 

Columbus was a nut. He went from capital to 
capital trying to find a Icing -porty enough to back 


least - while I am only a pea-nut 


his plan for making the geography twice as big, and 


particular nuttiness as they were. 


they joshed him. 


Galileo was a nut, but they didn't josh him. 
When he said the world went round the sun, they 
tied him to a rack and tortured him until they made 
turn take it back. 


for advertising is in its infancy; that better artists. 
than have yet been used can make posters that will 
get over, make a greater impression, and sell more 

I do believe that if I had a chance" to talk to 
you, I might (mind you I only say "might*') be able 


Newton was a nut But we might not know 
yet what makes the apple fall if it wasn't for Ike 
the Nut 

Watt was a nut and we have the steam-engine. 


to suggest something better than you have used or 
Anyway, I am always willing to put my time 


Singer was a nut and we have the sewing- 
machine. 

Morse 1 was a nut and we have the telegraph. 


against yours to find out 


Fulton was a nut and we have the steamboat 


RUSLING WOOD 



Earnest Elmo Calkins is also a nut. His -particular type of nuttiness 
is that he is never willing to see an advertisement leave the office of Calkins 
y Holden until it is carefully designed, thoroughly written and capably illus- 
trated. 



tKW 



«42ss? 



Prohibition 



tin in puM.V. &a( 1/ 



Crow Crjtlal ;«Ttc» 







CTOSS SUMMER CLOVCi 






Cron Cr««/ r/o. f #r 




^MKta,Q-<VLAJ 










« 



TheOnlyPopularTax 
is the Tax on Others 

The New Taxes will be 
founded on Justice, In 
all Justice there is an 
admixture of Injustice. 
To this injustice we can 
offer one consolation— * 
we will get used to it. 







Life is too short in 
which to make two 
reputations.. One rea- 
son Mark Cross has 
never relaxed the stand' 
ards of excellence since 
184S. 



Cross Silk Bag 





sSSfr 



The advertiser who 
throws dust in his reader? 
eyes will eventually blind 
them to his own attraC' 



Cross Silk Bag 




*J$RoS$ 



Many years ago <m poet 
speaking of various things 
said that "Many a flower 
is born to blush unseen." 
This column is intended to 
prevent our sharing that 
dark obscurity. 



Believing that arguments about quality " are not read 
with as much conviction by the public as by the writer 
of them" Frederic T. Murphy of Mark Cross amuses by 
the epigrams at the head of his advertisements. 



50 Making Advertisements 

He is ready to indorse What-Has-Been-Done 
and to question Anything-DifTerent. His let- 
ters come to you " Dictated but Not Read." He 
has his secretary call you on the phone and keeps 
you waiting until he gets ready to talk, 

If he is an advertiser his modesty about his 
concern takes the form of saying, " We think 
we have a rather unique organization here," 
meaning, of course, that there couldn't possibly 
be another organization so good. 

He protests that he doesn't interfere with his 
company's advertising in any way but mentions 
casually that he " dashed off a little thing a year 
or so ago " which was used as a full page adver- 
tisement and " everybody said it was the best 
thing the house ever did." 

Such a man can be prevailed upon to consent, 
with just the proper amount of reluctance, to 
sign his company's advertisements and presently 
he will honestly believe that he wrote them him- 
self or, at the least, that he " wrote them in the 
rough and let somebody else whip them into 
shape." In color advertising he likes any color 
if it is red. He " doesn't know anything about 
art, but he knows what he likes." 

Transplant that type of man to the advertis- 



Discovered 
RICORO ? 

Told by a Theatrical Manager 




** Each puff deserves an encore — 

and the price brings down the house" 



"A Dramatic Critic discovered 
the Ricoro cigar," said the Theat- 
rical Manager— "and it was the 
best thing that bird ever did. 

"It was on the opening night of 
'The Music Master' when I spot- 
ted this fellow smoking in the 
wings. Before I recognized him I 
hissed, 'Hey, no smoking! Lay off 
that cigar !' and regretted my 
brusqueness as soon as I saw who 
he was. 

"Later, I met him in the green 
room and apologized. 'No offense 
—no offense,' he laughed. 'I'm an 
inveterate smoker, and have a 
cigar going most of the time. Try 
one of 'em— see if you blame me!' 



"I lighted up-and, Shades of 
Bopth ! It was some cigar ! When 
he said it was a Ricoro, and that 
I could buy 'em for only 10 cents 
at any United Cigar Store, it 
was as pleasant a surprise as the 
two-column boost he gave the 
show next morning!" 

Sooner or later you'll discover Ricoro 
— You'll be astounded at the quality of 
Ricoro. It is a beautifully made cigar of 
rich tropic fragrance and gentle mildness. 

The popular prices of Ricoro are made 
possible because it is im- 
ported from Porto Rico duty 
free. A dozen sizes and 
shapes — 8c to 3 for 50c. 
Sold only in United Cigar 
Stores— -Thank Your' 




UNITED CIGAR STORES 



-tfa ISjdtorfyftdi "Giaour 




A striking copy idea, consistently carried out. Notice the way in which 
the theatre motif runs through the copy. In each advertisement of this series 
prepared by the Federal Advertising Agency, the choice of words was just 
as appropriate. 



Getting Out of the Rut 51 

ing business and he becomes " a merchan- 
dising expert." He exerts pressure on pros- 
pects through bankers. He shakes hands at 
dinners, moving from table to table. He joins 
organizations. Mysteriously he speaks of prob- 
lems. His customers are clients. * When you 
phone to him he is always in a conference. 

His assistants are pale reflections of himself 
and, since they commonly do most of his work 
while he pounds desks in offices, his assistants 
apply his ideas to the preparation of advertising. 

Their minds run in the grooves already carved 
by others. They aren't taking any chances and 
they aren't going through any unnecessary mo- 
tions. Apparently they believe that if you ring 
enough changes on the good old appeals and 
presentations you can take care of any advertis- 
ing campaign ever started. So why waste 
energy and risk failure by seeking anything 
new? 

A good illustration of those who are in the rut 
and those who get out of it is furnished by time- 
liness in advertising. To the bromides, timeli- 
ness merely means a chance to trail along with 
the thoughts which happen to be occupying pub- 
lic attention at the moment. To the sulphides, 



52 Making Advertisements 

it means an opportunity to do a striking thing in 
a striking way. 

The rut-nestlers welcomed the word camou- 
flage when it arrived from France — welcomed 
it, ran it into every possible piece of copy, 
twisted it this way and that, squeezed it into 
headlines, poured it into body text, and finally 
wore all the paint off. A little later they decided 
that every piece of copy ought to have a war 
angle and they showed snappy American 
officers packing their kits — officers with 
Sam Browne belts over the wrong shoulders, 
officers wearing campaign hats where tin hats 
would have been required, and officers wearing 
tin hats at the ports — always officers, always 
loading up their kits or getting advertised prod- 
ucts in packages from home. One American 
manufacturer actually decided that just to be 
different he would show plain doughboys using 
his product, and the effect was so refreshing that 
he received a round-robin letter of appreciation 
signed by six doughboys in France. 

Timeliness to many means copy planned ac- 
cording to the following illustrative formula: 
January- — a naked little boy representing the 
New Year; February — Cupids, hearts and val- 




A man starts in the whiskey 
business to-day. Offers ten year 
old whiskey to-morrow. 

Where does he get it? 

I give up. Out my way we can't live 
ten years over night I am able to sell old 
whiskey because I have an old business. 

M c Henry 

Founded 1812. Costs you no more. 



A<t= Fa 

If you find a dealer who 

doesn't keep M c Henry 

please step softly: hell be 
cross if you wake him Up. 

Founded 1812. Costs you no more. 



B 

Father Time is a partner in 
my business. He 'tends to 
the aging. Most folks use 
a printing press instead. 

M c Henry whiskey 

Founded 1812. Costs you no more. 




c 

They say the good die young. 

M c Henry whiskey is 

very old and very good. 

Mistake somewhere. 

Founded 1812. Costs you no more. 



These clever street car cards are by J. K. Fraser, the inventor of the 
famous Spotless Town series. 



54 Making Advertisements 

entines; March — St. Patrick and shamrocks; 
April — Easter lilies, Easter eggs and rabbits; 
May — either May-poles or the Decoration Day 
motif; June — the sweet girl graduate; July — 
Uncle Sam and firecrackers; August — sailing, 
seashore, vacations; September — back-to- 
school stuff; October — Hallowe'en, witches, 
Jack-o'-lanterns ; November — turkeys ; Decem- 
ber — Santa Claus. 

Watch the people who pride themselves on 
the seasonableness of their copy and see how 
many work these ideas into their pictures, their 
borders and even into the headlines and copy. 

That isn't timeliness. That's getting your 
copy ideas from the almanac. Here are some 
instances of genuine timeliness, instances which 
smashed their way to public attention: 

At one o'clock one morning last summer the 
British dirigible R-34 started on her homeward 
voyage. The New York papers on the morning 
of her safe arrival in England carried a full- 
page advertisement reproduced on the opposite 
page. 

One day while the submarine war was still 
going on, the wireless brought word to New 
York that a passenger steamship had been sunk 




took her home 



The fuel tanks of R-34 were filled: 
with SoCOny Aviation Gasoline 
on her trip home. 

Quite naturally she made splendid time and her 
engines did all that was asked of them — driven 
by clean-burning, power-full SoCOny Gasoline. 

STANDARD OIL COMPANY OF NEW YORK 



SOCONY GASOLINE 



When the whole world was thinking about R-34, the McCann Company 
saw its legitimate opportunity to present the reliability of Socony Gasoline. 
It would be difficult to find a more apt example of the proper use of timeli- 
ness in advertising. 






The sign of a reliable deale 



Getting Out of the Rut 55 

at sea. The next day the W. S. S. people pub- 
lished a full-page based on that event. 

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, a 
hat merchant on Forty-second street decided 
that his landlord's most recent raise in rent was 
one too many. He told the public all about it 
in a five-column advertisement the next day, say- 
ing that he preferred to sell hats at his regular 
price, and that he would continue to do so at his 
new address. 

The same people who say that " advertising 
must be a fascinating game " are now beginning 
to add that they " understand it has been reduced 
to pretty much of a science." 

Why, it hasn't begun! To be sure it has pro- 
gressed further in ten years than in the preced- 
ing two decades and further in thirty years than 
in the preceding thirty centuries. But why? 

Not because of anything done by the type of 
advertising man who is content to make his ad- 
vertising like other advertising. For all of him, 
clothing advertising would still show men in 
plug hats and tail coats, men looking like villains 
in the ten-twenty- thirty melodramas. Patent 
medicine advertising would still go as univer- 
sally unchallenged as it goes today in many 
otherwise respectable papers. 



56 Making Advertisements 

When Charles Austin Bates showed the ad- 
vertising world that a mailing card could be cov- 
ered with humor and salesmanship and humanity 
all at once; when Earnest Elmo Calkins and In- 
galls Kimball proved that art and taste were as 
much at home in advertising as in galleries and 
libraries; when S. Wilbur Corman demonstrated 
that the language of everyday had more selling- 
power than stilted sentences ; when Stanley Resor 
decided that an advertising page could be made 
as interesting as an editorial page; when J. K. 
Fraser found that people liked jingles which 
rhymed and scanned, and that a whole volume of 
argument could be condensed into a phrase on a 
street car card ; when Richard H. Waldo proved 
on Good Housekeeping that a magazine could 
guarantee all merchandise advertised in its 
pages; and when Ogden Reid and G. V. Rogers 
gave him an opportunity to clean up the adver- 
tising ideas of New York by proving with the 
New York Tribune that the same principle 
could be applied by a newspaper — 

These were a few of the moments when adver- 
tising took a leap forward and upward in this 
country. If these men had been afraid to 
recommend a new idea or if the people whose 



P.P.C. 



P.P.C. 



Printing Facta Printing Facta 



The paragraph you are now 
reading is not "justified." 
That is, it is set up just like 
typewriting with a " space " 
of equal width between all of 
the words. Each line starts 
all right at the left-hand 
edge, but ends where it will. 
Now, typesetting differs from 
typewriting in that the right- 
hand edge must be as straight 
as the left-hand edge. This 
result is achieved by insert- 
ing " spaces " of varying^ 
width between the words, and 
sometimes " letter-spacing " 
the words themselves. This is 
called "justification." 

{Continued on Thursday) 

Publishers PrintingCompany 

209 West 25th Street 

Telephone Chelsea 7640 



P.P.C. 

Printing Facta 

Type smaller than ten point 
should never be used for advertis- 
ing literature. Then, too, this 
ten-point type should be leaded, 
as in the paragraph you are now 
reading. 

Here we have eight point solid. 
Twice as many words can be set to the 
square inch in this size as in the ten 
point leaded, as shown above. Nine out 
of ten people will refuse to read an ad- 
vertisement when it is set in type as 
hard to read as this. 

When tempted to use a small- 
sized type it is always better to 
boil down the story to half of its 
original length and set it in ten 
point, leaded. 

PublishersPrinting Company 

209 West 25th Street 

Telephone Chehea 7840 



(Continued from Tuesday ) 

Now this paragraph has been 
justified. The ragged edge at the 
right has disappeared. One of 
the tests of composition, whether 
by hand or machine, lies in the jus- 
tification. 

Sometimes you see too many 
words crowded into a line. This 
makes for difficult reading. 

When there are too 
few words ' to a line, 
the spaces between the 
words are too conspicuous, 
and the result is dis- 
tinctly unpleasant. 

The skilful compositor is ex- 
ceedingly particular about his 
justification, because this per- 
haps above all else makes for 
good or bad typography. 

Publishers Printing Company 

^09 West 25th Street 

Telephone Chelsea 7840 

P.P.C. 

Printing Facta 

Here is a good formula for those 
Who use photo engravings: 

Line cuts can be printed on any 
kind of printing paper. 

Half-tones of 133 screen and 
150 screen can be printed on coated 
paper. 

Half-tones of 120 screen and 133 
screen can be printed on super 
paper — or a good quality of Eng- 
lish Finish Paper. 

When in doubt always use the 
coarser screen — but not coarser 
than 120. 

Do not try to print vignettes 
on uncoated paper. 

Publishers Printing Company 

209 West 25th Street 

Telephone Chelsea 7340 



Here is one firm that educates customers. Ralph I. Bartholomew is re- 
sponsible for these fine examples of how to pick and then sell an audience. 



58 Making Advertisements 

advertising they were preparing had said, 
" Well, we've never done anything like that be- 
fore," advertising would never have shown its 
amazing progress. 

But it's only fairly well started. The biggest 
part of the job lies ahead. In his book, " Preju- 
dices," H. L. Mencken says: 

" Why do we Americans take off our hats when 
we meet a flapper on the street, and yet stand covered 
before a male of the highest eminence? A Conti- 
nental would regard this last as boorish to the last de- 
gree; in greeting any equal or superior, male or 
female, actual or merely conventional, he lifts his 
head-piece. Why does it strike us as ludicrous to 
see a man in dress clothes before 6 p.m. ? The 
Continental puts them on whenever he has a solemn 
visit to make, whether the hour be six or noon. 
Why do we regard it as indecent to tuck the napkin 
between the waistcoat buttons — or into the neck ! — 
at meals ? The Frenchman does it without thought 
of crime. So does the Italian. So does the Ger- 
man. All three are punctilious men — far more so, 
indeed, than we are. Why do we snicker at the man 
who wears a wedding ring? Most Continentals 
would stare askance at the husband who didn't. 
Why is it bad manners in Europe and America to ask 
a stranger his or her age, and a friendly attention in 
China? Why do we regard it as absurd to dis- 
tinguish a woman by her husband's title — e.g. Mrs. 
Judge Jones, Mrs. Professor Smith? In Teutonic 



Getting Out of the Rut 59 

and Scandinavian Europe the omission of the title 
would be looked upon as an affront." 

And later in the same chapter: 

" Why do otherwise sane men believe in spirits? 
What is the genesis of the American axiom that the 
fine arts are unmanly? What is the precise machin- 
ery of the process called falling in love? Why do 
people believe newspapers? . . . Let there be light! " 

There are scores of questions which the adver- 
tising man wants answers for, as Mr. Mencken 
says: 

" After all, not many of us care a hoot whether 
Sir Oliver Lodge and the Indian chief Wok-a-wok- 
a-mok are happy in heaven, for not many of us have 
any hope or desire to meet them there. Nor are we 
greatly excited by the discovery that, of twenty-five 
freshmen who are hit with clubs, 17f will say 
4 Ouch ! ' and 22 J will say ' Damn ! ' ; nor by a table 
showing that 38.2 per centum of all men accused of 
homicide confess when locked up with the carcasses 
of their victims, including 23.4 per centum who are 
innocent; nor by plans and specifications, by Caglios- 
tro out of Lucrezia Borgia, for teaching poor, 
God-forsaken school children to write before they 
can read and to multiply before they can add; nor 
by endless disputes between half-witted pundits as to 
the precise difference between perception and cogni- 
tion; nor by even longer feuds, between pundits even 



60 Making Advertisements 

crazier, over free will, the subconscious, the endo- 
neurium, the functions of the corpora quadrigemina, 
and the meaning of dreams in which one is pursued 
by hyenas, process-servers or grass widows." 

It's undoubtedly true that many of the same 
fundamentals underlie all branches of business 
and that advertising men are constantly encoun- 
tering parallels between one man's puzzles and 
another's. The cry of " My business is differ- 
ent! " is still prevalent though it is on the wane. 
But there are hundreds of questions which ad- 
vertising men want answered — advertising men 
who are not satisfied to shuffle the same old pack 
of ideas and deal to their customers from the 
same deck. 

Why do all women respond to the style ap- 
peal? It's easy enough to say that it is their in- 
stinct to adorn themselves. Why is it? Be- 
cause they want to attract the opposite sex? 
Why should they? In some races women do the 
wooing — even in this country among the cliff- 
dwellers of Arizona, if we are to believe those 
who have studied the tribe. 

Why does the woman run the household ex- 
penditures in some homes and the man in others? 
Are those people right who tell us that nearly 



Getting Out of the Rut 61 

90 per cent of purchases for the home are made 
by women? Have they studied enough homes? 
Perhaps they have, but have they? 

Then why advertise to men at all? And yet 
every advertising man can remember successful 
advertising of this type in the so-called men's 
magazines. Is that because men's magazines 
are read by women? 

Is there any such thing as a man's magazine 
or a woman's magazine? How distinct is the 
line between mass and class circulation? Can 
you say that this newspaper is read only by 
horny-handed sons of toil who get into subway 
expresses in their overalls? Can you say that 
that magazine is read only by those who eat hot- 
house grapes, drive racing cars, winter at Palm 
Beach, have nine servants and children who 
elope with chauffeurs and show girls? 

You see low-priced merchandise selling out of 
the magazines whose contents are supposed to 
be a secret among Newport cottagers and dia- 
mond necklaces being profitably featured in 
newspapers read by stenographers. Nor has 
this condition been limited to the recent days 
when high wages have made the poor rich and 
the income tax has made the rich poor. A cer- 



62 Making Advertisements 

tain perfume advertiser has made a success of 
advertising to Fifth Avenue in order to sell 
Third Avenue. 

Since all your friends tell you they never read 
long advertisements, who does? 

You can still find people who are indignant 
because the flat magazines carry over their 
stories into the advertising pages and you can 
find just as many people who feel that the old 
standard magazine, with its advertising section 
at the back, seems small and cramped. Which 
size is better from an advertising viewpoint? 
Is it better to strike a reader when his mind is 
on a carried-over story and when you must pull 
his eye away from editorial matter or when he 
is frankly leafing over the advertising pages? 
Besides, how big is a page? 

Is a reader who subscribes to a magazine a 
better prospect than one who buys it on a news- 
stand? What is the right proportion between 
subscriptions and news-stand sales? 

You may argue that the subscriber is a better 
prospect because he has shown his interest by 
contracting for a whole year of the magazine at 
once or that the news-stand buyer is more valu- 
able because he voluntarily makes the effort of 



The Lulus' Home Journal forOMvr. 1910 100 




LY father has a motor-car 
And mother too can steer.it. 
My sister owns a bicycle 
But I may not go near it. 

Upon « red velocipede 
My brother rides about 

And even baby has a cart 
When nursie takes her out. 

I am too big for go-carts, and 
My mothersays, too small 

To have a tricycle like Nan's 
Because I'd maybe fall. ' 

So whenl used to want to travel 
Up or down the street 

I almost always had to go 
Just only on my feet. 



But now I've something of myown 
That takes me near or far, 

1 don't suppose you'd guess, but it's 
A reg'lar Kiddie-Kar! 

I had a fight with Bobby Lee 
He'd always want to ride it 

And took it almost every day 
Until I had to hide it. 

And then one time 1 just went up 
And asked his daddy whether 

He couldn't have one too, and now 
We Kiddie-Kar together! 



XT IDDIE KAR, first built by a father for 
■*-^- his own child, is not a grown-up's idea 
of what a child ought to like, but a simple 
conveyance which satisfies a natural instinct 
of the child. It fills a period not taken care 
of by any other vehicle. 

It is perfectly safe, even for a baby one 
year old. It is close to the ground and 
almost impossible to tip over. There is 
nothing to pinch fingers or tear clothes. 
No sharp corners, no splinters— every sur- 
face is sand-papered. No adjustments to 
get out of order No paint to come off. 

It is the only practical indoor' vehicle. 
It gives the child healthful exercise out- 
doors. It is used the whole year round. 

Don't wait till Christmas. Get one for 
your child to ride these brisk October days. 

You will find Kiddie-Kar wherever juve- 
nile vehicles are sold. 



REAL KIDDIE^KARS 

five sizes 



Made 



KIDDIE-KAR,! 



ARE MADE ONLY BY WHITE 

Kiddie-Kar 

MADE IN AMERICA FOR AMERICAN GIRLS AND BOYS 

Jingles can rhyme and scan and you can -pack a volume of selling talk into 
three short paragraphs — if you have Richard Walsh of Barrows 6° 
Richardson as your copy-writer. 



Getting Out of the Rut 63 

going to the news-stand to get his copy. But 
the subscriber's interest may lag and he may 
leave next month's issue in its wrapper until 
some one starts a fire with it. And the news- 
stand buyer may forget to go to thestand next 
month. And there you are. 

Why will a man unhesitatingly buy a cigar for 
another man when he would not think of select- 
ing a box of cigarettes for the same man? Is it 
because the brand names of cigarettes have been 
impressed so much more generally and insist- 
ently than the brand names of cigars that indi- 
vidual tastes in cigarettes are more generally rec- 
ognized? Or is it because the man who buys a 
cigar for a friend knows that his selection will 
be welcome since he usually pays more for it 
than he thinks his friend would venture to sug- 
gest? 

Why will a certain piece of copy pull like a 
mule in a certain publication and curl up and 
die in another of the same type? 

What is the mysterious driving force that gets 
into some campaigns of apparently mediocre 
merit and lifts them on to success without a sec- 
ond's hesitation? Is it timeliness, keeping just 
far enough ahead of popular desires, brains or 



64 Making Advertisements 

just luck? Every advertising man can remem- 
ber campaigns in which the stage had been 
beautifully set, everything possible had been 
done — and nothing happened. Every adver- 
tising man can remember ill-fated campaigns in 
which everything went wrong from the start of 
preparation to the day the first advertisement ap- 
peared — and then suddenly it swept along se- 
renely to success. There is something almost 
alive about a campaign at times — as elusive as 
a three-foot putt, as contagious as a saxophone 
obligato — as skittish as a village vamp. 



IV 
ATMOSPHERE 



IV 
ATMOSPHERE 

You are walking along Fifth Avenue and 
your eye is attracted by a scarf in the window of 
a haberdasher's establishment. You enter the 
shop and are conscious of a number of sleek 
young men standing about. 

One of them bows to you. You explain that 
you would like a closer look at those scarfs in the 
window, and you ask their price. 

" They are twelve dollars, I believe," he re- 
plies, and his manner suggests that he disap- 
proves of displaying merchandise so publicly. 
If it were left to him there would be no show 
windows to attract the idly curious like yourself. 

"May I see one?" you ask. Another bow. 
He goes to the back of the shop and has a con- 
ference with an even more important personage. 
This man calls to some one answering to the 
name of Jenkins. Evidently Jenkins is the man 
who does the rough work around the place. He 
doesn't mind exposing himself to the public view 

6 7 



68 Making Advertisements 

by inserting the upper half of his body into the 
show window. 

Presently the scarf is laid before you. Clearly 
your request has put a considerable number of 
people to a great deal of trouble, so you examine 
this scarf with respect. It is a very presentable 
scarf. Its color is good and its texture is agree- 
able. But under ordinary circumstances you 
would hardly think that it represented twelve 
dollars. If you passed a man wearing that scarf 
on the Avenue you would not be likely to ex- 
claim, " There goes a man wearing a scarf which 
cost twelve dollars! " 

But with the sleek young man standing ready 
to have you prove yourself either a connoisseur 
or an impostor you shrivel into a coward. 

" I'll take it," you murmur. 

Atmosphere did it. 

In one of the most exclusive suburbs of an 
Eastern city a carefully dressed young man 
walked briskly along an avenue of homes. 
From his crisp straw hat to his well polished 
cordovans he suggested just the right degree of 
smartness. He turned in at one of the most at- 
tractive homes, swinging his walking stick. 

From an upper window a lady saw him ap- 




One word is sometimes stronger than a volume. Joseph Husband of 
Husband & Thomas found several which he used one at a time in this power- 
ful series. 



Atmosphere 69 



proaching, heard him run up the steps, cross the 
veranda and ring the bell — two short rings, the 
summons of a busy man with no time to waste. 

She reached the front hall just ahead of her 
maid. As she opened the door the young man 
made two gestures — one with his right hand 
and one with his left foot: he took off his hat and 
he stepped backward. Instinctively she opened 
the door even wider. He stepped inside. 

Ten minutes later she smiled on him as he de- 
parted. And then, rather breathlessly she real- 
ized that she had committed herself to pay four 
dollars a year for a subscription to the fashion 
magazine which the young man represented. 

Back in a sky scraper in New York sat a man 
in an expensive office. He could tell you why 
the lady herself had come downstairs to open 
the door. Atmosphere did it — the good 
clothes, the busy walk, the air of importance, 
and the right type of man. If she had seen a 
carelessly dressed man shuffling along the side- 
walk, glancing hopefully at the second floor 
windows, she would have called to her maid to 
say that she wasn't at home and to tell that book 
agent not to come back. 

The man in New York could tell you why she 



jo Making Advertisements 

unconsciously invited his representative to enter. 
Again, atmosphere — the courtesy of a lifted 
hat, the deference expressed in the backward 
step, disarming her instinct of self-protection. 
If he had taken a step forward she would have 
closed the door. 

But for all these trifles the guiding genius in 
New York would take small credit compared to 
the idea to which he attributes the success of his 
salesmen's methods. That idea was the finishing 
touch. It was the walking stick. 

He found that no matter how carefully he 
drilled his salesmen in their approach, no matter 
how well they were dressed nor how adroit they 
were in the blend of chivalry and firmness that 
makes a man successful in selling to women, the 
percentage of orders to calls was not satisfactory. 
Then he sent out for a dozen walking sticks. 
He paid four dollars apiece for them. And he 
will tell you that they were the best investment 
he ever made. They opened doors. They pro- 
duced orders. They are now standard equip- 
ment — as vital as the hidden pocket that holds 
the prospectus without making the suit bulge. 

The creation of atmosphere is even more im- 
portant in advertising than in spoken salesman- 



STA«$» 



Striking 
Burglars 

At thlt aittrtlttmait 
got*. to prett let /corn 
t t h t Burgtart' 
on hat dtctded to 
i ttrikt at a prolttt 
\tt tin at thtir 
mtmbtrt hating beat 
ttopptd early ontt 
in§ uhiltt going of 
dull. 



Cku rsclcmpk rrcmt 



CtgtTCmt,TimmW»gW*UA 





*B& 



Samson 

Took 

Two Columns 

It is suggested that Sam- 
son had a keen idea of ad- 
vertising. Samson took two 
solid columns, with the re- 
sult that he brought down 
the house. 



CROSS 



So far the Peace 
Casualties are not 
excessive in propor- 
tion to the numbers 
engaged in the 
struggle. 




l M°& 



Hamlet 
Revised 

A leather article with- 
out the Cross trade-mark 
is, as the Frenchman said, 
"like the play of Omelette 
without the egg.'* 





*& 



A London clergyman 
assures us the world is 
coming to an end this 
year. In view of the ap- 
parent inability of the 
world to settle Us prob- 
lems, this may be the 
best solution after all. 



The Mark Cross advertising is notable for the element 
of "atmosphere" expressed by the trademark, the head line 
and the epigram and carried on through the entire layout. 



72 Making Advertisements 

ship. And there is no more vital phase of ad- 
vertising than the study and practice of creating 
atmospheric effects. 

If the three elements of an advertisement are 
the copy, the picture and the type, then the 
term which includes all three — the layout — 
is of first consequence in achieving atmosphere. 

The looks of an advertisement are like the 
looks of a salesman. There was a day when 
merchants cared very little how their salespeo- 
ple dressed and acted. Today there are fixed 
standards of clothes and manners. 

Similarly, there was a time when mighty little 
thought was given to the choice and arrange- 
ment of type, to the balance of picture and print, 
to the illustrations, technique and the copy's 
character. But today it is realized that first 
impressions are even more vital in an advertise- 
ment than in the appointments of a shop. 

A clever salesman can win you around even 
though you may be unfavorably impressed by 
his store, when you first enter it. But if an ad- 
vertisement's appearance repels you, or even 
fails to attract you, the advertiser has lost his 
opportunity with you once and for all. 

A famous merchant sums up the duties of his 



Atmosphere 73 



advertisements in this order: Be seen, be read, 
be believed, be convincing. 

If a manufacturer of wrenches were to choose 
a fastidious face of type, associate it with a 
dainty border and a delicate drawing, your 
first glance at his advertisement would say to 
you : " This must be an advertisement of a sachet 
powder." 

And no matter how vigorous and man-to-man 
his argument might be, you would refuse to be- 
lieve that it was selling wrenches. And you 
would be right; it wouldn't sell them. 

Every business, no matter how young or how 
old, has a personality. To catch the spirit of 
that personality and to reflect it in words and 
type and picture is the job of every advertise- 
ment. 

If a man is selling an automobile costing sev- 
eral thousands of dollars, he refuses to admit that 
his car has anything so plebeian as an engine. 
He emphasizes the little comforts of upholstery 
and fixtures. He gets you into a luxurious 
frame of mind when you see his advertisement 
just as he does when you enter his salesroom. 

In his advertising he does it by using color 
pages in the magazines where he shows you the 



74 Making Advertisements 

exquisite work of the best available artists. His 
car is incidental. The foreground, peopled by 
the idle rich, may be a club window or a country 
club lawn or a famous church. 

His message may be confined to a dozen words 
or even no words at all — just atmosphere. 

He is not like the merchant who must go into 
details by telling you whether a bookcase will 
fill a certain space in your library, how a new 
article of office equipment will simplify your or- 
ganization's routine, or whether a new kitchen 
device is simple enough to be mastered by a 
somewhat skeptical Finn. He needn't even 
mention the price. Even King Richard III said, 
" My Kingdom for a horse! " — which is prob- 
ably the highest price on record for one good 
dependable steed. But the maker of high 
quality motor cars flatters you by taking it for 
granted that a question of a few hundreds this 
way or that will make no difference to you, just 
as he asks you to take it for granted that he has 
put under the hood an engine that will run. 

There is an old saying in advertising — that 
nothing can be said about a 25-cent cigar which 
has not already been said about a 5-cent cigar. 
If you descend to superlatives in selling a prod- 




FLANNEL 

IT IS THE PRIVILEGE OF FINCHLEY TO 
ANNOUNCE THAT A LIMITED NUMBER 
OF SUITS HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED IN 
FLANNEL OF THE TONE AND DISTINC- 
TION WHICH ONE IS INCLINED TO ASSO- 
CI ATE WITH ENGLISH GARMENTS DE- 
VOTED TO LOUNGE AND COUNTRY USAGE. 

CUSTOM FINISH WITHOUT 
THE ANNOYANCE OF A TRY-ON 

READY- TO-PUT ON 
TAILORED A T FASHION PARK 

Style Brochure mailed on request 

5W G5 t 46th. Street 
NEW YORK 



An extraordinary instance of the way that words can create a picture. 
Robert Mears, Jr., has made the Finchley advertising look like fashion and 
sound like fashion. 



y6 Making Advertisements 

uct of real quality, you find that the maker of 
inferior merchandise has been there first. So 
the strongest way you can convey an impression 
of supreme merit is by inference — by atmos- 
phere. The man whose merchandise falls in 
the class below yours may employ many of the 
devices of design which you also use, but he 
doesn't dare give as little information. 

But atmosphere is not confined to those who 
buy the art work of the Michael Angelos of our 
time. Atmosphere is not merely a question of 
a four-page color-insert describing and pictur- 
ing the beauty of a pipe organ in the home of a 
millionaire. 

Obviously the test of good advertising, from 
the standpoint of atmosphere, is whether it is 
in character with the product which it seeks to 
sell. 

Atmosphere can be employed in selling per- 
fume or china or rugs or kitchen sinks or vacuum 
cleaners or fountain pens or hosiery or collars 
or magazines or refrigerators or candy or pro- 
hibition drinks — anything that people want. 
By the endless combination of blocks of type, 
white space, appropriate pictures and borders, 
it is possible to convey to the reader at a glance 




A $10,000 
Mistake 



CLIENT for whom 
we had copied a 
necklace of Ori- 
ental Pearls, seeing both 
necklaces before her, 
said : Well, the resemblance 
is remarkable, but this i§ 
mine! 

Then she picked up ours! 



T E C L A 

398 Fifth Avenue, New York 
10 Rue de la Paix, Paris 



In his copy for Tecla Pearls, Frank Irving Fletcher has actually put the 
burden of proof on the oyster. 



78 Making Advertisements 

as accurate an impression of the product's char- 
acter as he could get from a five-minute selling 
talk by an expert salesman. Advertising's ne- 
cessity has been the mother of its invention; if 
it has only the flash of an eye in which to create 
its atmosphere it will do it in that instant — if 
it is good advertising. 

There are some people, of course, who want 
you to give them artichokes instead of cabbage 
and want it publicly announced that they are 
getting artichokes. Secretly they may prefer 
cabbage, but they like to have people think that 
they wear gardenias to business. Those people 
keep in mind constantly what the neighbors say. 
They like the idea of getting away with some- 
thing. They will reject a good piece of mer- 
chandise for a poorer one if the poorer one has 
points of resemblance to a much higher priced 
piece of merchandise. There are several ex- 
amples of this in the motor car world. 

But society advertising which talks like a 
middle-class Londoner fools very few people. 
In America handkerchiefs are still worn in 
pockets. Perhaps you smiled at the story of the 
Western miner who, in despair at the Waldorf 
menu, ordered fifty dollars' worth of ham-and- 



Atmosphere 79 



eggs, but in your heart you admired him. The 
only way for a rough diamond to seem real with 
real people is to be rough. 

He wanted to buy his ham-and-eggs at the 
place where he understood they sold the best 
ham and the best eggs. Merchants realized this 
human trait. A certain concern once adver- 
tised a $350 watch. Only a half dozen of them 
were made. They weren't intended to sell. 
But the fact that this company could make a 
watch worth $350 sold hundreds of $35 watches. 
A well-known hat concern advertised a $25 felt 
hat — not because it would be bought but be- 
cause it would make its $5 hats seem much more 
valuable. 

In selling to the masses, Marshall Field & Co. 
recognize this, as you will see from this article 
appearing in Printers Ink: 

" To get atmosphere and contrast, Marshall 
Field & Co. give prominent display to expensive 
articles taking valuable space which would sell 
directly much greater quantities of popular 
merchandise. 

" That is why we displayed, in our most valu- 
able window during the last August fur sale a 
$7500 Hudson sable coat; that is why we have 



80 Making Advertisements 

displayed and sold men's cravats as high as $10; 
$4000 bedroom sets, $4500 dining room sets, 
$10,000 rugs, a $25,000 painting, $2400 Cheney 
phonographs, $85 ready-to-wear suits for men, 
$25 hats for men, $35,000 pearl necklaces, china 
service plates at $3000 a dozen. People reason 
that if a store carries merchandise like this the 
proportionate quality must exist in lower priced 
articles. 

" Manufacturers and retailers of quality mer- 
chandise with an appeal to a limited market are 
often confronted with the problem of how far 
they can go in their * Classy ' class appeal. 
They are afraid of shooting over the heads of 
their audiences. 

" The success of Ivory Soap, Lux, Community 
Silver, Arrow Collars and other marketers of 
low-priced merchandise in creating, by adver- 
tising, an atmosphere of ' class ' we find paral- 
leled in our own store. We couldn't get the 
volume we do entirely on ' class ' merchandise. 
Conversely, we couldn't get the desirable l bread 
and butter ' business without the influence of the 
i class.' In other words, Mrs. Jones likes to 
trade where Mrs. Lake-Shore-Drive buys, and 
Mrs. Lake-Shore-Drive comes here because she 



Atmosphere 81 



gets merchandise which is in many cases better 
than that produced elsewhere, plus i Field Ser- 
vice.' " 

The people who most thoroughly realize the 
importance of atmosphere in advertisements are 
those who are selling high-priced merchandise. 
To them " atmosphere " means only " refined 
atmosphere " just as to them the word " quality " 
means only " high quality." In a play about 
life in the slums, the atmosphere may be squalid. 
And if you ask a wrong-headed salesman about 
his competitor's goods you will find that quality 
may be poor. But sellers of high-priced mer- 
chandise look only at the bright side when they 
speak of atmosphere and quality. 

So they have devised a technique of their own 
in copy, picture and type. To many people it is, 
just as it probably always will be, incomprehen- 
sible, especially in pictures. 

Why, they ask, should we have this race of flat- 
chested young men with vacant stares, whose 
chins are too small and hats are too large? Why 
should they prowl their way through the pages 
of magazines and newspapers, driving their mo- 
tor-cars, smoking their cigarettes, sipping their 
drinks and — most of all — wearing their 



82 



Making Advertisements 



clothes with such an air of being bored with 
life? 



THAT 




ALL 



Like the alimony which Is the last 
link between an incompatible couple, 
the only thing which our men's hand' 
tailored clothes have in common with 
machine - made clothes is the price. 
Men's Suits $ 2$ tx> $ 6$ t Overcoats. $ 30 to $ 8$. 




FIFTH AVENUE 
Men's Shops, 2 to 8 West 38th Street— Street Level 



You probably won't find many people who actually look like this, but they 
are the symbols of fashion. By his brilliant and sophisticated copy Frank 
Irving Fletcher has been able to throw around the Franklin Simon adver- 
tising a note of well-bred style without foppishness. 



And why should their wives, sisters and sweet- 
hearts glance up at us from the printed pages 
like startled fawns, covering their chins with furs 
or uncovering their throats with pearls — so 



Atmosphere 83 



slim-fingered, so marvelously coifTed, and so dia- 
phanously gowned? 

Obviously they are symbols. They stand for 
what is technically called class. And of course 
there are very few type-faces worthy of associa- 
tion with this race. They like the restraint and 
stateliness of Bodoni, the delicacy of Kennerley 
or its sisters Goudy and Cloister Old Style and 
at times they are in the mood for the absolute 
purity of Caslon Oldstyle No. 471. 

Occasionally they go wild — reaching out af- 
ter some of the decorative types whose origina- 
tors must have set themselves the task of design- 
ing the most intricate possible network of fine 
lines. Certainly they never could have intended 
their handiwork to be read. 

In a word, the constant effort for effects some- 
times lays itself open to the suspicion of intro- 
ducing a false, not to say a falsetto, note. Par- 
ticularly is this true in the words, the copy, that 
accompanies atmospheric designs. 

There is a certain kind of copy concerning it- 
self with fashions which has developed a lan- 
guage all its own. It is the direct lingual de- 
scendant of the London merchants who adver- 
tised that they were purveyors of everything 



84 Making Advertisements 

from top hats to marmalade to His Majesty the 
King. 

In its place, and when employed for the right 
purpose, copy of this sort has its legitimate use. 

A Fifth Avenue jeweler whose name is known 
all over the world may put that name in the cen- 
ter of a page of white space, adding nothing ex- 
cept the words " Diamonds and pearls " and the 
phrase " Purchases may be made by mail." But 
there is nothing more absurd than a piece of copy 
which is only fine writing. Quiller-Couch has 
a splendid piece of advice for this: 

" Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate 
a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — 
whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending 
your manuscript to press. Murder your dar- 
lings." 

A man runs a shop selling women's clothes at 
popular prices. One day his ambition soars and 
he decides to become more exclusive. Some one 
digs up an antique French border design for 
him, has his name lettered by hand, and changes 
the headline which used to read " Prices Slashed 
on Ladies' Suits " to " Unusual Price Conces- 
sions in Women's Apparel." 

And yet the appalling fact about advertising 



Atmosphere 85 



is that it can and does change the character of 
an establishment. Just when you decide that 
the sort of quality copy used by a merchant is en- 
tirely out of keeping with his business, you wake 
up to find that it has completely changed the 
class of his trade and that he is moving his shop 
to a better neighborhood where his new custo- 
mers prefer to shop. The history of many lead- 
ing merchants in our large cities is the strongest 
proof of advertising power as a democratic 
force. It has lifted countless struggling mer- 
chants out of the sidestreets and onto the boule- 
vards. Its atmosphere can crystallize the ideal 
of a business more accurately than many spoken 
words. 



V 
SINCERITY 



SINCERITY 

ALL the sparkle and persuasion and drive of 
good advertising copy comes when the person 
who wrote it was so filled with belief in his sub- 
ject that he couldn't wait to get his enthusiasm 
down on paper. If there is one quality that 
least can be spared from copy it is sincerity. 

A well-known advertising agent had just 
finished an informal talk before a group of news- 
paper representatives and had thrown the meet- 
ing open for questions. 

" What do you consider the most important 
thing in copy? " asked one man. 

Without hesitating a second, the agent re- 
plied: 

" Sincerity!" 

You can strip an advertisement of almost any- 
thing else — beauty of form, clarity of expres- 
sion, taste of arrangement, excellence of idea — 
and still you will have something left, something 
that will reach out and grasp people, if your 
advertisement rings true. 

89 



90 Making Advertisements 

People often point out the great variation be- 
tween the advertisements of two successful ad- 
vertisers. 

" Which one is good advertising? " they ask. 
" This one violates every standard of taste and 
yet there is something about it that gives it as 
much power as that beautiful advertisement." 

Sincerity is the reason. Two advertisements 
may be as different as a subway guard and an 
Episcopal bishop and yet each one will make its 
appeal. Advertisements are like people. If a 
man is sincere you can forgive him almost any- 
thing. One salesman comes to see you with a 
manner that is so abrupt or so shy that your first 
impulse is to tell him to go out again into the rain 
which drove him into your office. And yet if 
he is sincere, if he honestly believes in what he is 
selling, and you give him half a chance, he will 
probably leave as good an impression with you 
as the man whose manners carry a high polish. 

It's equally true that a lack of sincerity can 
ruin the best materials ever used in the construc- 
tion of an advertisement. Take a drawing made 
by an artist whose technique is faultless but who 
has the idea that he is going slumming whenever 
he dips into commercial art, combine it with a 



•"':■' ; \ 


f^. ,± — 1 






1 ]Wj%fg& 





THE GLORY OF THE UPWARD PATH 

As told in the. letters of men who are travelling it 



TWO paths begin at the bottom 
of the hill of life. 

One of them winds about the base, 
thru years of routine and drudgery. 
Now and then it rises over a knoll 
representing a little higher plane of 
living made possible by hard earned 
progress; but its route is slow and 
difficult and bordered with mon- 
otony. 

The other mounts slowly at first, 
but rapidly afterwards, into posi- 
tions where every problem is new 
and stirring, and where the regards 
are comfort, and travel and freedom 
from all fear. 

Let us glance for a moment at the 
letters men write who are treading 
this fortunate path. Such letters 
come to the Alexander Hamilton 
Institute in every mail; they are 
the most thrilling feature of the 
Institute's business day. 

Exultant letters they are, full of 
hope and happiness; the bulletins 
of progress on the upward path. 

My income has increased 
7 SO per cent 

HERE is one from an official in 
the largest enterprise of its 
kind in the world. "In the past 
eight years my income has in- 
creased 750%. The Course, has- 
been the foundation in my business, 
training.". 

Another from an officer in a 
successful manufacturing company: 
"Last Friday was a happy day for 



me: I was elected a member of the heights of executive responsibility 

Board of Directors of this company, and reward which lie at the end of 

The day when I enrolled with the the upward path. 
Alexander Hamilton Institute was 

the turning point in my career " You ere paying whether yoU 

profit or not. 

Whole volumes could be filled __ , . . , 

with letters of this sort. A few of I T "^ ™ n * f"."* ,0 .•? tha * ^ 

them have been printed in the 1 are paying for busmesstra.mng whether 

Institute's book entitled "Forging . you take " or not - N^hel*" '* 

Ahead In Business." Thousandsof lst ™*- ... 

others are open records in the You are paymg « years of moderate 

Institute's offices. progress when the progress mightbe rapid 
and sure; paying in opportunities that pas* 

In the past ten years the Alexan- you by because you have not_$he training 

der Hamilton Institute has enrolled or self-confidence to reach out and grasp 

thousands of men in its Modern them; paying in years of routine service 

Business Course and Service; and when you might enjoy the. stimulus and the 

to-day the monthly rate of enrol- glory of the upward path. • 

ment is more than-three times as -».#__«•». tt. j 

great as ever before. Send ,0T "Urging Ahead 

• in B mine st" 

They are men who are rpHOUSANDS of ««*. have taken the 

moting Up I first definite step up. by sending for 
^^ .- * the 1 16 page, book which the Alexander 
•"•THESE were men, not boys, Hamilton Institute publishes entitled 
l „k» »!,„„ vr.^UnA - Tk»;, "Forging Ahead In Business." It contain* 
X when they enrolled. Their wort fi * hiIe ^^^ information, and 
average age was thirty-three years, letters from men in positions exactly similar 
They had already made their start «? >«"*• lt . wi " «* sent without ob ^ 
in business; they were-successful in &£££ 'sSflor^SSy^ 
one department — in selling, or ac- 
counting, in production, or banking. Alexander Hamilton Inatitute 
or insurance, or factory or office _ 
management. ^^T^L-r-SSSSS 
The Alexander Hamilton Insti- 5S*J»-*88«S ***»**. •»<>£»• 
tute rounded out their knowledge by 
giving them the fundamentals of all 
departments of business. Few men 
in business ever gain that all-round Basics* 
knowledge: so few that the "demand 
for them is always in excess_of the 
supply. 

They are the men who reach the f^SZ" '. 



The narrative form of copy has made a -place for itself in advertising which 
calls for direct and immediate action on the part of the reader. Bruce Bar- 
ton finds that in the Alexander Hamilton Institute advertisements, a very 
effective method is the human, inspirational style that stirs such a response 
from his editorials and articles in the magazines. 



92 Making Advertisements 

few vapid words by a writer whose chief interest 
in the advertisement is to finish it before lunch, 
have these words put into type and the two ele- 
ments arranged by a designer whose life is 
spoiled because he didn't think of making Type 
Charts before Ben Sherbow did, and what do 
you have? A pleasing advertisement, perhaps, 
representing several hundreds of dollars in its 
manufacture and several thousands in its prog- 
ress to the public eye through magazine space, 
but without a flicker of spirit and life and what 
has been latterly called jazz. 

There ought to be something about an adver- 
tisement as contagious as the measles. Without 
sincerity an advertisement is no more contagious 
than a sprained ankle. 

Measure the advertisements that you see by 
this standard of sincerity. See how this quality 
permeates the familiar campaigns that have been 
swinging along at a successful gait from one sea- 
son to another. And see how it is absent from 
those campaigns which seem to be forever start- 
ing, stopping, taking fresh starts and then dying 
out altogether just when they appear to be almost 
ready to go. 

What is this quality called sincerity and how 



Apple Pie 

Good Apple Pie is making the Hotel Belleclaire, 77th St and 
Broadway; famous. Who would think such a thing was possible? 

You see now important it is to look after the smallest details, in 
hotel management. 

Good pastry cooks and good cooks in other lines are big helps in 
making a hotel popular. 

The Apple Pie made is so good that families for blocks around die 
Belleclaire telephone 9100 Schuyler — "Please send us an Apple Pie." 

It is sent. And wherever it goes it makes friends for the hotel. 

The Belleclaire is not in the bakery business, but it is a Service 
Hotel. It sends whole meals to families living in the neighborhood 
whenever they want them. 

It is an accommodation, that's 'all — but it pays to be accommodat- 
ing. It certainly pays in adding to reputation, if it does not pay in 
any other way. 

Here is a story of a Belleclaire Apple Pie sent to a manYhome at 
1 o'clock last Sunday night. The man himself told it in the presence 
of the writer in the Belleclaire Barber Shop last Monday morning: 

44 We were motoring yesterday and had a late dinner. We did not 
think we would want any Sunday night supper, but around 10 o'clock 
we felt hungry, so I telephoned the Belleclaire to send around some 
Swiss cheese sandwiches, made of rye bread, and an Apple Pie. 

"And, say, that Apple Pie was great! The pastry cook who 
makes it should be decorated with the Iron Cross. He must have spent 
a great part of his life in an apple orchard. He certainly knows what 
to do with apples in an Apple Pie. 

It must be good Apple Pie, or who could eat it at 10 o'clock at 
night, following a supply of Swiss cheese sandwiches, and live to tell 
the tale .the next day? 

The other food articles served at the Belleclaire are just as good 
as the Apple Pie. 

Rotert D. Blackmgru 

Manager, Hotel Belleclaire. 



// there is one quality that stands out in William C. Freeman's copy it is 
sincerity. This advertisement caused hundreds of New Yorkers to send 
around to the Hotel Belleclaire for apple pies. 



94 Making Advertisements 

can it be obtained for an advertisement? Pres- 
ently a number of suggestions will be offered, 
some of which may be found useful in achieving 
sincerity. But this is one underlying general 
truth which may well be regarded before enter- 
ing upon a detailed consideration : 

Somewhere at the very heart of every success- 
ful campaign is some individual who radiates 
his enthusiasm for the product and the idea be- 
hind it. He refuses to be satisfied with less than 
his own mental picture of what the advertising's 
reflection of that idea shall be. He fights for 
his belief. And eventually some of his own fire 
creeps into the copy. 

Whether it is only a smouldering glow or a 
raging blaze usually depends upon this individ- 
ual's distance from the finished advertisements. 
If he is inside of the advertiser's own organiza- 
tion and if he must pass along his enthusiasm 
through three or four intermediaries until it 
reaches a copy man hidden away in the dark 
recesses of an agency's service department a lot 
of the original heat will have cooled. 

If he happens to be the head of a manufactur- 
ing business and he gives his thoughts to his 
sales manager who relays them to his advertising 



Sincerity 95 



manager who passes them on to an agency's ex- 
ecutive and the agency's representative deals out 
the ideas to the head of a copy department and 
the copy chief assigns the job to one of his bright 
young men, what chance has enthusiasm to sur- 
vive? 

The campaign, in that case, is actually written 
by a man who is lucky if he even gets a sample of 
the product. Ordinarily his greatest source of 
information is stale " literature." And it's one 
of a dozen jobs that pass over his desk in the 
course of a week — that and nothing more. 

As you cut out each stage of separation from 
the enthusiasm to the man who writes the cam- 
paign, you increase the chances of finding sin- 
cerity in the finished result. And that, after all, 
is suggestion number one. 

The head of a business wrapped up in the suc- 
cess of his enterprise is able to communicate his 
enthusiasm to those associated with him. He 
honestly believes that in making its product the 
company is serving its country more valuably 
than any other business on earth. He isn't try- 
ing to fool anybody — not even himself. He has 
thought over this thing so intensively that he sees 
in it possibilities which no one else imagines. 



g6 Making Advertisements 

It is said that the Priority Board in Washing- 
ton was approached by the representatives of 
every sort of industry — men who manufactured 
everything from steam shovels to candy and 
from locomotives to perfume — all of them en- 
thusiastically declaring that their industries were 
essential. It cannot be claimed that all, or any 
great share of them, were trying to fool the Gov- 
ernment. They were simply sincere business 
men, so engrossed in their lines of business that 
they could not conceive of greater importance 
attaching itself to any other industry. To each 
one it seemed imperative that he be permitted to 
go his way, manufacturing his product and thus 
helping to win the war. 

Because men of this type are scattered through 
American business, this country is particularly 
rich in successes built in a remarkably short 
time. Men are willing to make tremendous 
sacrifices of time, energy and personal comfort 
because they believe in a business so sincerely 
that they want to save every possible minute in 
telling others about it. Men like this, when 
they understand advertising, have the patience 
and vision to use advertising effectively. And 
they insist that in their advertising shall be that 



Sincerity 97 



same fire of sincerity which they themselves 
feel. 

A man like that is an advertising man's most 
valuable point of contact in any organization. 
Too many of the men met in factories and execu- 
tive offices have been so busy studying their own 
work that they have gathered no grasp of the 
business as a whole ; or they have been over the 
same ground so often that they have ceased to 
consider it exciting. But usually there is one 
man for whom the lustre hasn't worn off. He 
may be the president or the general manager. 
He may be the advertising manager or an assist- 
ant advertising manager or a plant superinten- 
dent or a sales manager. He may be a salesman 
— one who has refused opportunities to do exec- 
utive work because he has something of the mis- 
sionary in him and he loves to spread the tidings 
of his product among the trade. Whoever and 
wherever he is, he is worth finding. For he has 
the spark. 

Occasionally the outside advertising man him- 
self is the one who supplies the note of sincerity 
that creates an advertising success. Looking 
upon a business with eyes that have not been 
dimmed by disappointment, he sees possibilities 



98 Making Advertisements 

which no one inside the organization has 
glimpsed. He fights for his ideal of what the 
campaign should be and by sheer weight of en- 
thusiasm pulls a backward advertiser to success 
in spite of himself. 

A moment ago something was said about sug- 
gestions for achieving sincerity in advertising. 
That was the wrong word ; you can't achieve sin- 
cerity. If it isn't there, it can't be created. But 
it can be allowed to project itself into advertis- 
ing. The forces that smother it can be held 
back. It can flourish and grow if it has half a 
chance. 

One good rule to follow is to cut out most first 
paragraphs of advertising copy. 

Once a young copy writer wrote a booklet 
which had what he considered a particularly 
able beginning. His boss read the first page and 
then carefully drew his pencil through the first 
paragraph. 

" But you've cut out my whole introduction," 
the young man protested. 

"Exactly," said the boss, "you are like an 
acrobat who comes out, wipes off his hands, 
tosses away his handkerchief, puts rosin on his 
feet and then starts to work. We haven't room 
for the preliminaries in advertising." 



Sincerity 99 



Very often when a person starts to write copy 
he hasn't a very clear idea of just how he wants 
to start. So he will grope his way through sev- 
eral sentences and then, by that exercise, his 
mind opens up and he swiftly re-states in a sec- 
ond paragraph exactly what he was trying to 
say at first. But he forgets to cross out the first 
paragraph which, after all, was only practice. 
And he is hurt when some one says, " It takes you 
too long to get into your subject." 

Careful writers realize that if a first para- 
graph isn't good, it doesn't matter much what 
goes into the second paragraph because mighty 
few people will read that far. 

Archie Fowler, The Suns Washington cor- 
respondent at the time of his early death, sat in 
front of his typewriter one night jingling the 
keys. He sat there for forty-five minutes with- 
out writing a word and he had just come into the 
New York office after a long trip with Mr. Taft 
who was then President. And it was within an 
hour of press-time! 

But when he started, he stopped only long 
enough to put fresh paper in his typewriter. 
And in less than an hour he had written two 
columns in the style that was all his own — care- 



ioo Making Advertisements 



ful, accurate, with a grasp of his whole subject, 
lighted up by revealing, whimsical incidents. 
Some one who had watched him said as he fin- 
ished : 

" Had a hard time getting started tonight, 
didn't you? " 

" I'd rather write a dozen columns," he said, 
" than one lead." 

A third way to leave the way clear for sincerity 
in copy is to keep out artificial tricks and super- 
ficial stunts. There are legitimate devices which 
make copy vivid and responsive, but the path 
is strewn with ideas that looked brilliant and 
weren't, with trade characters which warped 
whole selling plans, with adjectives upon which 
thousands were spent before it was found that 
they weren't descriptive, with an attempt at con- 
tinuity in a series where one or two advertise- 
ments were natural and good and the rest were 
painfully strained to fill out the duration of the 
campaign. 

One of the most spectacular failures in adver- 
tising was scarcely an advertising failure. It 
was a merchandising failure. A certain product 
of doubtful merit was advertised by a trade char- 
acter — one of the funniest and most appealing 



REPUTATION 

One advantage of em- 
ploying a contractor with 
a reputation is that he has 
got to maintain on your 
job the reputation, he has 
made ori a hundred others. 

THOMPSON-STARRETT 
COMPANY 

Building Construction 



EUCLID 
REVISED! 

The shortest distance 
between two points is the 
Thompson-Starrett Com- 
pany, 



THOMPSON-STARRETT 
COMPANY 

Building Construction 



CROWDING 
THE MOURNERS 

As an up-to-date build- 
ing organization we are 
sometimes a little ahead 
of time, like the Christ- 
mas magazines that come 
out in Novemberl 



THOMPSON-STARRETT 
COMPANY 

Building Construction 



DELAY 

We are the last place to 
come to for delay, but the 
first place to come to to 
avoid iU 

THOMPSON-STARRETT 
COMPANY 

Building Construction 



When New York advertisers speak of small-space copy, they usually 
mention the Thompson-Starrett Company' 's advertising. It is interesting 
not for itself alone but because it was the first copy written by Frank Irving 
Fletcher who now writes a dozen conspicuous campaigns. Other specimens 
of the extraordinarily high standard of his work are shown in these pages. 



102 Making Advertisements 

characters that ever found its way into the pages 
of newspapers and magazines and onto the bill- 
boards. He was a hit because he typified a na- 
tional characteristic. He jumped into current 
slang. People called their friends by his name. 

In fact he was so clever that people thought of 
him and not of the product that he advertised. 
He dumbfounded the manufacturers of his 
product by the volume of his sales. For in 
their heart of hearts they must have known that 
the product wasn't especially good. 

They had intended to improve the product but 
when the popular response was so great they 
failed to see the necessity of making the mer- 
chandise as good as the advertising. They 
didn't realize that one of the fundamentals of 
advertising is that a product must have merit. 
Advertising tells too many people about a prod- 
uct; if it isn't good, somebody will find it out. 
Advertising, by extending a product's acquaint- 
ances, makes either friends or enemies. It all 
depends upon the product's worth. 

Then an astonishing thing happened. They 
stopped advertising, believing that they had won 
their market. And their sales flattened out al- 
most overnight. It is never safe to stop consis- 



THE STORY OF RE VILLON FURS 




©1918 



Tukalook and his Wife 



THE Eskimo trapper is honest and gentle but 
primitive in his ways. He lives in a snow hut 
built of large snow blocks, which he cuts with huge 
knives made for the purpose. These snow knives are^ 
among the trading articles most in demand in the 
Hudson's Bay district. Field glasses are also very 
highly prized, as they enable the Eskimo hunter to 
see at a distance the herds of caribou which furnish 
his winter's meat supply. 

Mrs," Tukalook wears furs, and she can skin .very 
expertly the animals her husband traps, but she. 
knows nothing of the subsequent processes by which 
furs are made into the smart coats and sets offered to 
Revillon patrons in the New York and Paris stores. 



OJ^villonlreres 

Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street 



A great deal of comment was created by this unusual series by the Churchill- 
Hall Company. 



104 Making Advertisements 

tent advertising of a good product; too many 
competitors are always just around the corner 
waiting to take your place in the public's atten- 
tion. But when advertising is stopped on a poor 
product, there is nothing left. When you apply 
a lighted cigarette to a toy balloon there can be 
but one result. 

The advertising in this case had been a stunt. 
Properly backed by a good product and con- 
tinued on an intelligent basis, it would have built 
up a satisfactory, consistent volume of sales. 
But, because the product wasn't up to standard, 
the advertising couldn't make repeat sales. It 
sold plenty of new customers every day, but when 
the advertising stopped, so did the sales. The 
first mistake, of course, was in spending so much 
money on an inferior product; for nothing will 
make a big success with advertising which 
would not make a moderate success without ad- 
vertising. The second mistake was in giving 
the advertising cleverness but not sincerity. 

Clever, as it was, the copy was not sincere be- 
cause there was nothing much that could be sin- 
cerely said about the product. So a fourth good 
idea in making sure of sincerity in copy is to 
see to it that the product is worthy of all the fine 



Sincerity 105 



things that are said about it. That was the mer- 
chandising failure in the campaign. Bear in 
mind that merchandising means simply to trade, 
to buy and sell. To buy something of doubtful 
merit is merely stupid. To sell something of 
doubtful merit is dishonest. Such a funda- 
mental error in merchandising as to sell an infe- 
rior article by pumping up the sales through 
advertising is like inflating a punctured tire. 
What you say may be sound enough but the sales 
volume won't stick because there is a leak in 
quality. 

There was another fault in this campaign. 
The advertising was too clever. It drew atten- 
tion to itself instead of to the product; though 
perhaps that was just as well in this case since 
there might not have been any first sales, to say 
nothing of repeat orders, if people had been al- 
lowed to think too much about the product. 

As a rule, though, manufacturers are not 
afraid of letting people think about their prod- 
ucts. In fact that is the one thing they most hope 
to accomplish through their advertising. And 
advertising that is too clever is like a smart- 
alecky child. It says, "Look at me!" And 
most people prefer to look the other way. 



106 Making Advertisements 

Even when it attracts attention, it is like an 
actor who emphasizes his own eccentricities so 
strongly that you always see the actor and never 
the play. 

Take half a dozen of the cleverest slogans you 
know — not the most effective, but the cleverest 
— and ask a dozen people what these slogans 
advertise. You will find that while almost 
every one remembers the slogan, the number of 
people who link it with its product is surpris- 
ingly small. 

Often you hear a person say: 

" That was a mighty clever advertisement I 
saw the other day — put out by some cigarette 
concern — the one that said " — and so on. 
" What cigarette was that? " you ask. " I don't 
remember " is the reply. " You must have seen 
it. It was some cigarette." 

They remember what the advertisement said 
but they forget what it advertised. The trick 
caught their fancy but the argument missed their 
pocketbook. 

But a slogan can be clever and still keep your 
mind fixed on what it advertises. Slogans like 
" If it isn't an Eastman, it isn't a kodak," or 
"Never say Dye — say Rit" have all the de- 



Sincerity 107 



sired piquancy and still they never could be 
mistaken for advertisements of anything other 
than Kodaks and Rit. 

Many people still seem to believe that attract- 
ing attention is the greatest function of adver- 
tising and that even unfavorable attention is 
preferable to being ignored. They point to the 
Ford jokes and say, " Look how many cars they 
sold!" 

It is useless to speculate on whether Mr. Ford 
would have sold more cars if there had been no 
jokes. But it is safe to say that the basis of his 
success was not bad jokes but good engines. 

Perhaps it is fair to say that any manufacturer 
who produces something so good that it outdis- 
tances competition, for so little that it is within 
the reach of the many, is a law unto himself. 
But unfortunately most advertisers are operating 
in a highly competitive field and to them it is im- 
portant, if their advertising is to be sincere, that 
they inspire respect rather than merriment. 

It is not sufficient that they make people talk. 
The German people have made a great many 
people talk about them in the past five years, but 
it has not advanced their position in the esteem 
of the world. If you would let sincerity per- 



108 Making Advertisements 

vade your advertising, don't let people laugh at 
you. Let them laugh with you — or, better yet, 
smile with you — but ridicule is a mighty hin- 
drance to the respect that is inspired by sincerity. 

There is a certain type of copy which is full 
of pitfalls for sincerity. That is copy which 
takes the form of dialogue or direct discourse. 
When an advertisement is written as people are 
supposed to talk, the danger signals should go 
up. 

" I now have more attractive clothes, yet save 
half," says the headline of an advertisement 
about lessons in dressmaking. Would any wo- 
man ever say " Yet save half "? 

A golf ball advertisement shows a story-book 
Scotchman saying, " The mon wha plays th' — 
haes the honor at every tee." 

What if his opponent used the same ball? 
Who would have the honor then? 

The conversational form doesn't ring true in 
either case. One is stilted; the other develops 
a bad slice off the fairway of fact. 

If copy is to talk, it must talk like people. 
Many of our magazines show Mrs. Housewife 
entertaining a caller with a description of the 
household device in the corner. She is saying: 



Sincerity 109 



" Yes, Edith, like you for years I failed to see 
the advantages of the Household Helper with 
its superior workmanship, quality materials, and 
eight points of advantage. Then on our wed- 
ding anniversary, John brought it home and now 
I have plenty of time for calling, shopping, go- 
ing to the movies, embroidery, basket-weaving, 
skating, golf, playing the saxophone and read- 
ing snappy novels." 

People talk that way — in advertisements. 
Oh, yes they do. But they shouldn't. When 
copy goes into the first person it must be as true 
to character in choice of words and truth of 
viewpoint as the lines of the people in a play. 
It can't talk like a sales catalogue and still sound 
natural. It can't drag in talking points and still 
be real. It can't offer an argument that any one 
can shoot full of holes and still be convincing. 

A recent piece of recruiting copy for the 
United States Army started like this: 

When I got out of the Army, I raised my right 
hand over my derby and said, " Never again, I 
hope!" 

And I am here to state that I was just one of 
about 3,000,000 who felt that — only stronger. 

It was my privilege to kick, and believe me, I did. 
I couldn't get out too quick — I wanted a feather 



no Making Advertisements 

bed, restaurant food and trousers that flapped 
around my ankles. 

But now that I'm out, civil life is not all that we 
cracked it up to be! And the Army looks like a 
pretty good place, after all. 

That was written by an advertising man named 
Tom Ryan — a former captain of artillery who 
knew at first hand what he was writing about. 
It rang true with army men, officers and soldiers 
alike, and with civilians too. It was in char- 
acter. It stuck to the facts. A man who had 
not been in the army could never have written 
that copy. There was nothing in it that 
could make an ex-doughboy exclaim : " Aw, 
bunk!" 

It had the quality which O. H. Blackman calls 
" reverse English " — the strength of under- 
statement, the restraint which gives a feeling of 
confidence and latent power. 

It is the quality which distinguishes the con- 
versation of S. Wilbur Corman and which he 
has put into his own copy and was caught so 
effectively by his associate, Jim Adams, in the 
Mennen's Shaving Cream campaign. 

Years ago it was present in the marvelous ad- 
vertising copy written by the late John O. 




Listen- 



You Biggest City 
in the World! 



Always in a hurry— aren't you? You 
arc so crowded for lime that you can 
never spare more than half an hour to 
watch a man crawl op the face of a 
skyscraper, or to study. how a chauffeur 
puts on a new tire, or to learn from 
a window demonstrator about an auto- 
matic necktie. 

Give me one minute and I'll show 
you how to enjoy shaving every morn- 
ing for the rest of your life. Isn't that a 
more instructive use of a minute than to 
watch them frying flapjacks in a Cbilds* 
window? 

The reason that you find shaving so painful is because you 
rub half dissolved, caustic soap into the pores, raising a lot of 
tiny blood blisters which the razor slices off. The trouble isn't 
that your beard is tough or your skin tender — your soap is 
bad and your method is wrong. 

Get a tube of Mennen Shaving Cream— 'which perfectly 
softens the toughest beard without rubbing in with fingers. 
Squeeze half-an-incb of cream onto a brush that is full of 
cold water. Whip up a lather on the point of your chin 
and spread gradually over the face, adding water constantly. 
Use three times as much water as any ordinary lather will carry. 
Work this Mennen lather in for three minutes with the brush 
only. Keep your ringers out of it 

Then enjoy the most glorious shave of your shaving career. 
Note afterwards that your face doesn't feel as if someone 
had rubbed salt into it but on the contrary is smooth and free 
from smart. 

Come on— New York— be a sport I y 

Give Mermen's a trial and he not only the biggest but the 
happiest city. 



mcnn£n salesman Q 



Jim Henry tay»— "What 1 like about New York b that It 
remind* me of every other country town.**' 



Sometimes an advertiser thinks the public must be flattered. Wilbur Cor- 
man and Jim Adams take New York by the throat in this piece of copy. 
And they sell lot of shaving cream in the process. 



H2 Making Advertisements 

Powers for Macbeth lamp chimneys. If mem- 
ory can be trusted, one of those advertisements 
said : " I make poor lamp chimneys, too. But I 
don't put my name on them." 

More and more the desire for sincerity in ad- 
vertising is developing this quality of under- 
statement. Some one once observed that noth- 
ing could be said about a twenty-five cent cigar 
that had not been said already about a five cent 
cigar. The day of superlatives has passed. 
Every product can't be the best. The careful 
magazines have done wonders in not only dis- 
couraging the use of superlatives but in actually 
censoring them out of copy. Today copy must 
be more than hollow boasting. Every product 
has its advantages. They need not be exclusive. 
One great difference between advertising and 
other forms of descriptive writing is that in ad- 
vertising you tell only your own story. The 
other man may be able to say all that you can 
say, but you happen to be paying for the adver- 
tising space and so it is your privilege to tell 
your own story and remain silent about the other 
man and his product. And the public associates 
attributes, which may be common to many, with 
the business house which most persistently and 



Greatest, Grandest 
and Finest 

Each year advertising becomes more believable as 
advertisers get a little older. 

Most lies are told by children, not with the intent 
to deceive but inspired by the seeming necessity for 
securing emphasis. 

The new advertiser wants to attract attention in a 
babel of voices, all demanding a hearing. 

So he shouts and screams and bellows with best oi. 
intention and with little result. 

He means no harm, but just wants to be heard and 
doesn't realize that his voice is cracking. 

As he grows older, he learns that red, after all, has 
only 60% of the strength of black, and that to be 
believed is more than just to be heard. 

Don't you agree that as advertising grows older- 
it grows milder and stronger? 

Advertising space in the Butterick publications 
is for sale by accredited advertising agencies. 

Butterick — Publisher 

The Delineator 
Everybody's Magazine 

Two dollars the year, each 



It would be impossible to estimate the good done to Advertising by such 
home-truths as these, fathered by Stanley Latshaw, and freely circulated in 
many newspapers by the Butterick Publishing Company. 



H4 Making Advertisements 

emphatically establishes its right to own those 
attributes. 

All that advertising needs to do is to show the 
merchandise, describe it truthfully and keep on 
doing these things — forever. 

There is no question but that a first-hand ac- 
quaintance with a piece of merchandise or an 
idea that is being sold will make for greater sin- 
cerity in copy. It eliminates the possibility of 
the superficial treatment that is the curse of too 
much advertising. And yet there is no reason to 
assume that a man cannot describe a sensation 
unless he himself has experienced it. 

A few years ago Stephen French Whitman 
wrote a remarkable novel called " Predestined." 
It told the story of a young New Yorker's slide 
downward through several strata of society. A 
writer for the book pages of a New York paper 
asked Mr. Whitman, with pardonable hesita- 
tion in the light of his hero's history, whether he 
thought a man had to go through an experience 
to describe it correctly. 

" There was a man named Flaubert," said Mr. 
Whitman, " who wrote a book called Madame 
Bovary. It describes the feelings and thoughts 
of a country doctor's wife in her unhappy mar- 



Sincerity 115 



ried life. Nothing could be more intimate or 
sympathetic or photographic. And yet it is safe 
to say that Flaubert was never the unhappily 
married wife of a country doctor! " 

The idea of an advertising man personally ex- 
periencing the uses of all the products which he 
advertises suggests a curious picture. Imagine 
an advertising man at his desk trying a new pipe 
tobacco while he shaves with a new safety razor 
with one hand and works out problems on a new 
calculating machine with the other. How 
would men ever be able to write copy about lin- 
gerie and how could women write about cigars? 
Yet they do. Even advertising writers must be 
assumed to have some imagination. 



VI 
COMMON SENSE 



VI 
COMMON SENSE 

LAWYERS have their offices lined with prece- 
dents. They can pull down calf-skin volumes 
and show you that even as far back as the Magna 
Charta it was possible to pry a client out of jail 
with nothing to work with but a writ of habeas 
corpus. And in common law states, lawyers 
say, they are still doing business on the prin- 
ciples which exasperated Cicero. 

Ask an architect whether the cornice on the 
new post office is correct, and he will go through 
the cathedral towers of Europe as swiftly and as 
surely as a German shell. He can tell you about 
the building plan of the first Egyptian temple 
more easily than an advertising man can tell you 
about the selling plan of the first Egyptian cig- 
arette. 

Look at the precedents a doctor has! They 
talk a lot about modern medicine, but some prac- 
titioner in the day of Socrates taught him how to 
mix a very efficacious poison by the simple com- 

v . 119 



120 Making Advertisements 

bination of a few scraps of hemlock stirred in a 
cup of cold water. 

Observe their clinics. Consider the number 
of cases which a doctor can watch in a week. 
And then think of an advertising man's handicap 
in being obliged to wait months or even years to 
see whether his prescription is right or fatal. 
For one idea, though, advertising is indebted to 
the medical profession. That's the " alibi " about 
the success of the operation in spite of the pa- 
tient's death. How true it is that an advertising 
campaign frequently does everything expected 
of it except sell the goods ! 

There will be some who will point to bound 
volumes of our very excellent trade papers and 
to boundless pages of hand-picked investigations. 
But compared to the law, medicine, engineering, 
architecture, acting, plumbing, cab-driving, 
teaching, keeping store, banking, contracting, 
farming, publishing or any other of our sister 
professions, advertising has no more guide posts 
than the Atlantic Ocean. With all the avail- 
able data on tap, the advertising man still has 
to answer a lot of questions by ear. Putting it 
another way, the best guide he has is his common 
sense. 



Common Sense 121 

The most successful advertising campaigns al- 
ways seem to be those which are founded on a 
perfectly simple idea — just the application of 
common sense to selling. 

If you want people to write to you for one of 
your booklets, it's been proved that the best way 
is to display a picture of your booklet at the top 
of your advertisement with a headline not about 
your product but about your booklet. That is 
only common sense. And yet many advertisers 
who put their booklet offers in very small type 
at the bottom of advertisements wonder why 
they don't get more inquiries. If a shop-keeper 
wants inquiries about an article, he displays it in 
his window. He doesn't hide it under the coun- 
ter at the back of his store. If an advertiser 
wants inquiries, and still more inquiries, he can 
get them if he devotes enough of his space to his 
offer. Whether it is always wise to go out after 
inquiries is another story. The point here is that 
if a man wants them, all he needs to do is exer- 
cise as much common sense as he would if he 
were dealing with people face to face. 

Occasionally some one looks very solemn and 
announces a great principle of advertising — 
such as " Show your product in action." 



122 Making Advertisements 



Rightly staged, that simple idea can be made 
to sound very weighty and mysterious. And yet 
it is a very old and well-established truth. 
When the New York Herald building was still 
in the up-town theater district crowds used to 
stand fascinated at the large plate glass windows 
watching the presses turning out tomorrow's pa- 
per. The white-clad gentleman who flips pan- 
cakes in Childs' windows always has an audi- 
ence. There's no question about it; people like 
to see a product in action. That's the principle 
behind the changing electric sign — the kitten 
fighting its way in and out of a tangle of silk, the 
fluttering petticoat, and the good old chariot 
race. 

Fortunately the excessive use of the word psy- 
chology is dying out, chiefly because most people 
used it to be impressive when what they meant 
was common sense. In a New York paper's 
business page this item was headed " Psychology 
in Shoe Selling": 

" A certain manufacturer of the better grade 
shoes for men, who recently had occasion to have 
new showroom fixtures installed, insisted that 
the wall cases containing the samples should be 
made without doors on them. ' There are two 



Common Sense 123 



reasons for this/ he said yesterday. ' One is that 
I have yet to find a door or sliding panel that will 
keep dust out of a case, which means that it is not 
only necessary to dust the samples but to keep the 
glass clean as well. The main reason, however, 
is that my experience has shown me that a buyer 
is sometimes kept from ordering a model be- 
cause he cannot take the shoe in his hand with- 
out wrestling with a glass door or slide, or hav- 
ing it done for him. The psychological effect of 
the glass between him and the sample weakens 
his buying desire. It gives him the same feel- 
ing that a person with a half a desire to buy 
chewing gum is apt to have when confronted 
with a box from which none of the packages has 
yet been removed. He looks and passes by, 
while a ' broken ' box would have made him 
spend his money.' " 

Another person might argue that to make the 
merchandise too accessible was just as great a 
mistake because the surest way to make a man 
desire a thing is to make him think he cannot 
have it. Tell an advertiser that his copy is not 
acceptable to a certain publisher and he will 
want nothing in the world so much as to get into 
that magazine, A certain concern turned its 



124 Making Advertisements 

whole merchandising plan inside out a few- 
years ago to conform to the standards of a news- 
paper which had refused its advertising. 

It's pretty dangerous business to lay down a set 
of rules and say they are based on psychology, 
because too often the theory can be upset by the 
experience of some one else. A very exclusive 
shop on Fifth Avenue finds that it can sell more 
merchandise by keeping all its stock hidden be- 
hind solid oak panels. One article is brought 
out at a time. 

Some jewelers prefer to dazzle their custom- 
ers by setting before them all at once a whole 
constellation of precious stones. Others insist 
that the most effective way is to show only two 
pieces — the one that they want the customer 
to buy and another one to make it look better by 
contrast than it would alone. 

One of the soundest ideas developed by the 
psychologists of business is concerned with this 
question : 

When is it necessary to go into detailed rea- 
sons and when can advertising simply be a re- 
minder? Frank Fehlman tells us that reasons 
must be given if you are talking about something 
new to the present generation ; but if you are ad- 



Common Sense 125 



vertising a product which our fathers and 
grandfathers used there is no necessity for the 
reasons why. 

Thus you must go into details if you are sell- 
ing a refrigerating system or a dictating machine. 
But if you are selling soap or tea or bread, you 
needn't stop to argue — just remind. 

Certainly no one will quarrel with the general 
principle of this idea. In fact, it wasn't neces- 
sary to hold laboratory tests to establish it. 

If a person who has never written an adver- 
tisement were asked to prepare two pieces of 
copy — one about a cake of yeast and one about a 
typewriter — wouldn't he instinctively go into 
more details in describing the typewriter than 
the yeast? Wouldn't his intuition tell him 
that more people knew less about the way 
typewriters work than about the way yeast 
works? 

And yet just when you get a principle safely 
nailed down, along comes something to tear it up 
again. Just the other day an advertising man 
told of his experience with a group of type- 
writer salesmen. He had been addressing them 
on the selling points of their typewriter and fi- 
nally he turned to the most successful one of the 



126 Making Advertisements 

lot and said : " Won't you tell us what arguments 
you have found most effective? " 

" Sure," replied the star salesman. " I carry 
one of our typewriters into an office and put it 
down on a desk and when I get a crowd around 
me I jab my finger down on some letter and when 
the key snaps back I lean over the machine and 
say, ' See? The blamed thing works! ' " 

Scientists have been able to fertilize eggs by 
mechanical processes and keep them alive, but 
the catch in the secret of life still remains : How 
do you make the egg? 

Psychology might teach that typewriter sales- 
man how to stimulate the interest of his pros- 
pects. But he knew a better secret than that. 
He knew how to make interest. His common 
sense taught him how. 

While the war was going on a great many con- 
cerns kept up their advertising even though they 
had nothing to sell. Many of them were con- 
sidered theorists and there was quite a lot of talk 
about advertising as insurance. Yet, as their 
competitors discovered, it was just plain com- 
mon sense. 

If you are separated from a person for several 
months and you don't write to him, he will begin 



Common Sense 127 



to forget you. Advertisers who drop out of the 
public's sight are always surprised to discover 
how soon they are forgotten. Many concerns 
are now trying to regain the places which they 
held before the war — places taken by competi- 
tors who kept their names before the public even 
though, or perhaps because, they used all of their 
space to promote war measures. 

It is not the purpose of these pages to belittle 
the earnest work being done by the real psycholo- 
gists of business. Perhaps practical men be- 
lieve that some of the laboratory tests are not as 
valuable as they might be if the subjects were a 
little less conscious that they were parts of a test. 
But it's all pointing in the right direction, toward 
the day which conscientious advertising men 
hope to live to see — when advertising will be 
an exact science with a full set of dependable 
precedents. 

Our quarrel here, if we have a quarrel, is with 
those who say psychology when they mean com- 
mon sense and a little knowledge of human na- 
ture. Like so many other superficialities which 
are fast disappearing from advertising as the 
public gets better acquainted with it and as 
earnest effort has taken the place of bluff, this 



128 Making Advertisements 

habit of calling simple things by big names is 
bound to go. 

But it is just as important for the advertiser 
to keep his feet on the ground as for the adver- 
tising agent. Occasionally an unreasoning prej- 
udice is encountered — a blind spot in common 
sense. 

An advertiser was discussing with his agents 
the list of publications for his coming cam- 
paign. He put his finger on one magazine and 
said: 

" I can't see that magazine. We never get 
that at our house." 

As if that mattered! Making up an adver- 
tising list from one's own library table is apt to 
be one of the quickest, as well as the surest, ways 
to seal a campaign's doom. 

Another advertiser who has made a tremen- 
dous success uses publications which he never 
sees except to glance over a copy occasionally to 
check his own advertising. He is a very fas- 
tidious, metropolitan type of person and yet, as 
an advertiser, he knows more about the papers 
which search out the rustic communities where 
the mail order crop is good than any other adver- 
tiser whom his agents ever meet. 



Common Sense 129 

He uses his head instead of his prejudices. 
He lets common sense make up his schedules. 

Another advertiser retains a prejudice against 
Sunday newspapers. It is futile to remind him 
that Sunday papers are made on Saturday nights 
and that if his conscience really works it will 
keep him out of Monday morning's papers 
which are made on Sunday. He doesn't believe 
Sunday papers should be read and he is not go- 
ing to lend them the weight of his patronage. 
Unfortunately others do — among them his com- 
petitors. 

If an advertising man were to lose all the at- 
tributes of success, one by one, the last one to 
sacrifice would be common sense. 

It tells him how to study a sales chart for its 
weak spots and shows him where intensive news- 
paper advertising should be done to bolster up 
a poor territory. It points out to him the proper 
relation between sales and population and tells 
him whether low figures from a group of West- 
ern States are caused by poor salesmen or just 
by a lack of people who can buy. 

It tells him when a manufacturer has a 
sufficiently wide distribution of his product to 
begin national advertising and helps him select 



130 Making Advertisements 

a list of magazines whose circulations are spread 
over the country in a way that produces the right 
amount of pressure everywhere. 

It warns him when to go slowly, when to try 
out every piece of copy cautiously and when to 
throw caution to the winds. It dictates the size 
of space, the kind of art work, the choice of type. 
Call it what you will, there is no better name for 
it than common sense. 



VII 

THE GREAT MYSTERY 
MERCHANDISING 



VII 

THE GREAT MYSTERY — 
MERCHANDISING 

A GREAT many people in and out of the adver- 
tising business like to think that there is some- 
thing rakish about it. They speak of it as a 
game, which it is not, of an advertising agency 
as a shop, which it is not, and of those who are 
engaged in it as clever, which is not at all the 
idea or the ideal of most advertising men. 

They speak of " ad-writers " and " ad-men " 
as a preceding generation spoke of lightning-rod 
salesmen ; bright young men, but you must keep 
an eye on them. In a certain good agency there 
is a standing rule that no one shall say or write 
the abbreviation " ad." Advertisement can be 
called adver/^ement or advertisement, since Mr. 
Webster countenances both, but the nickname 
" ad "is as unwelcome to the heads of this agency 
as the word " con " would be to a lung-specialist. 

The stage is beginning to produce a type of 
advertising man built with the same depth of 
character study as the stage newspaper-man, 

133 



134 Making Advertisements 

identified by his note-book and pencil. If you 
have ever known a newspaper-man you know 
that he may have a few crumpled sheets of copy 
paper in his pocket, but he almost always has to 
borrow a pencil. And by the same token it is 
not always possible to recognize an advertising 
man by his plans for acquiring great wealth un- 
der shady circumstances. Yet glibness with get- 
rich-quick ideas is the characteristic of the ad- 
vertising men who have crept into the drama. 
Some day some one will write a real play about 
advertising. 

Meanwhile this superstition of shrewdness 
with a touch of mystery persists. And because 
it persists inside as well as outside of the adver- 
tising business, people have a great fondness for 
coining phrases about it, and borrowing the 
phrases of others. 

They are not content to speak of a publica- 
tion's circulation. They talk of " consumer-ac- 
ceptance." They are not satisfied to say that it 
goes to retail merchants. They speak of 
" dealer-influence." They do not stop at saying 
that they reach about all the possible buyers of 
your product. They say that they " saturate 
your potential market," Or, if they are feeling 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 135 

even more exhaustive, they " exhaust all your 
potential possibilities." 

A period was passed in which the word distri- 
bution was as great a fetish in advertising as ef- 
ficiency has been in general business circles. 
But perhaps that was a healthy period, after all, 
for it came at a time when advertisers were in- 
dulging themselves in throwing handfuls of 
money at full pages in the magazines just to see 
it splash. After a few prominent advertisers 
had wasted considerable sums in this way it was 
pointed out to them that there was no use adver- 
tising their products all over the country if those 
products were on sale in only a few states along 
the Atlantic seaboard. 

Apparently that was a new idea to many ad- 
vertisers. Without reasoning it out exactly, they 
had rather expected advertising to do a little 
magic for them, so that when Mrs. Jim Rogers 
of Reno, Nevada, went to her local druggist and 
asked for their new tooth-paste she would find it 
even though the tooth-paste had never been sold 
to the trade west of the Mississippi. 

Publishers of nationally circulated magazines 
realized that if national advertising was to pay 
it would have to be supported by something like 



136 Making Advertisements 

national representation on the shelves of retail 
dealers. So the shout went up, " Have you 
got distribution? " 

And that started the word going the rounds, 
until no magazine representative felt that he was 
making a workmanlike solicitation unless he 
tucked in at least five " distributions " to each 
five minutes. And no agency man would let the 
conversation drift to anything so commonplace 
as copy and media so long as he could pierce his 
customer with a searching eye and make him 
confess his faults of distribution. 

Problem was, and still is, another word ea- 
gerly taken up. In a burlesque solicitation pre- 
sented at a dinner given by a certain publisher, 
the Representative began his talk with the Ad- 
vertiser by saying: " I just happened to be in the 
building and I thought I'd drop in and ask you 
about your problems." This fondness for call- 
ing everything a problem was beautifully satired 
in a circular recently issued by the George Bat- 
ten Company from which these paragraphs are 
taken : 

If you glance over any month's -advertising — 
national, newspaper, or direct — you can hardly 
avoid the conclusion that a large part of our popula- 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 137 



tion is running frantically around with a series of 
problems to be solved, while a smaller number, like 
unselfish schoolboys with " ponies," are standing by 
with the solutions of these problems ready to hand. 

A certain firm's ready-made suits will solve your 
clothing problem. 

Another man's bean has solved your baked-bean 
problem. 

Somebody's pressed brick can solve your pressed- 
brick problem. 

There are any number of things that will solve 
the housekeeping problem. 

A favorite way to conclude advertisements is, 
" What is your problem? " or, " Let us know your 
problem." 

Now it is a rather obvious fact that most of these 
alleged problems are non-existent. Few smokers 
really feel that they have a smoke . problem. Few 
motorists are conscious of a piston-ring problem. 
Not many of the just realize that their life is be- 
clouded with an umbrella problem. 

They just go serenely along, wishing they had a 
little more ready money. 

Why, then, so much talk about this problem and 
that problem? 

It is because advertising is apt to make the adver- 
tiser vain of his product. He needs to be a very 
well-balanced, common-sense sort of individual, else 
his advertising will affect him so much more than it 
does his consuming public that he will lose his entire 
perspective of the public consciousness. 



138 Making Advertisements 

But of all the words that have been over- 
worked in advertising, the greatest of these is 
merchandising. It drifted in at about the time 
of distribution, but its stay promises to be longer 
because it opens up vistas of infinitely greater 
variety. Its charm seems to be that it possesses 
in greatest measure the characteristic common 
to distribution, dealer influence, problem and all 
the rest of these trick words — namely, mystery. 

If you show that you are familiar with plain 
advertising, if you think that writing advertising 
sounds easy, if you know a man whose brother- 
in-law is an artist and so want to talk art, if your 
wife's cousin used to be a printer and you want to 
discuss printing — then the mystery man type of 
advertising man will tell you that he is not a plain 
advertising man; he is a merchandising expert. 

And there he has you. For you can't antici- 
pate the devious paths into which that word mer- 
chandising can lead the conversation. If you 
think that merchandising consists of intensive 
work with the jobber and the retailer, he will 
take you further back and ask you how you hap- 
pened to design your package the way you did. 
If your idea of merchandising is taking tinted 
maps of the United States and sticking them full 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 139 

of pins, he will ask you what cooperation you get 
from newspapers in the cities where you adver- 
tise. If you start telling about your system of 
discounts, he will speak darkly of an investiga- 
tion to discover whether, as Wilbur Corman 
once said, more blondes are left-handed in Kan- 
sas than brunettes in Connecticut. 

It is the x in advertising, is the word merchan- 
dising. It is the fountain of eternal youth, the 
pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the hidden 
treasure at the bottom of the uncharted lagoon. 
It may mean anything — or nothing. 

Now, the greatest trouble about this fondness 
for the pat phrase is that it indicates a poverty 
of vocabulary. 

" Poverty of language," says Adam Sherman 
Hill, " is the source of much slang, a favorite 
word or phrase — as nice, nasty, beastly, jolly, 
bully, ghastly, elegant, exciting, fascinating, 
gorgeous, stunning, splendid, awfully, utterly, 
vastly, most decidedly, perfectly lovely, per- 
fectly maddening, how very interesting! — be- 
ing employed for so many purposes as to serve 
no one purpose well." 

" The modern use of slang i is vulgar,' " writes 
T. A. Trollope, " because it arises from one of 



140 Making Advertisements 

! 1 

the most intrinsically vulgar of all the vulgar 
tendencies of a vulgar mind, — imitation. 
There are slang phrases which, because they viv- 
idly or graphically express a conception, or clothe 
it with humor, are admirable. But they are ad- 
mirable only in the mouths of their inventors. 

" Of course it is an abuse of language to say 
that the beauty of a pretty girl strikes you with 
awe. But he who first said of some girl that she 
was * awfully ' pretty, was abundantly justified 
by the half humorous, half serious consideration 
of all the effects such loveliness may produce." 

The first man who applied the word mer- 
chandising to his work had a vivid picture in 
his mind. No doubt he knew that the word, ac- 
cording to Webster, means simply to trade, to 
buy and sell. And since much advertising had 
failed because it had not taken into account the 
basic principles of buying and selling, he felt 
that if he could add merchandising to advertis- 
ing he would get better results. So his use of 
the word had a sound principle behind it — the 
principle of making advertising pay instead of 
throwing a handful of money at a printed page. 
Nothing could be sounder than that. But those 
who came after him have added a meaning here 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 141 

and a meaning there until the poor old word has 
no more spark in it than a war quality match. 

Some one once compared a page in the Satur- 
day Evening Post to a corner lot. They cost 
about the same — $6,000. Advertisers some- 
times gasp the first time they hear that figure. 
But that's not the fault of the Post. Respira- 
tion works back to normal when it is pointed out 
to the advertiser that he would have to pay 
$20,000 to buy enough one-cent stamps to ad- 
dress the two million people who get the Post 
every week. And certainly it would cost him 
another cent to print any message at all. So you 
see the $6,000 charged by the Post is a pretty 
economical way of saying something to two mil- 
lion Americans, even if you want to consider the 
rate of this advertising on its most superficial, 
and least sensible, basis. 

Here, then, is this plot of white paper which 
you can rent for one week at the cost of a corner 
lot forever. 

If you bought the plot of real estate you would 
consider very carefully what to put on it. You 
would get an architect's plans. You would 
think for a long time just where to place your 
house and your garage, just how many trees and 



142 Making Advertisements 

shrubs and hedges and flower beds to plant. 
And, if you are like most home-owners, you 
would fuss over that place in the evenings and 
early mornings and on Sundays for many months 
until you made it exactly the way you wanted it. 

Your page in the Post is as much of an invest- 
ment. It deserves just as thoughtful considera- 
tion. There is as much inconsistency in put- 
ting twenty-five dollars' worth of art work and 
two cents' worth of copy into that space as there 
would be in putting a twenty-five dollar shanty 
and two cents' worth of grass on your $6,000 lot. 

Advertisers have come to realize this and, en- 
couraged by the publishers, they are getting ex- 
perienced and trained assistance in preparing 
what they put into their space. 

More than that, they are laying their plans 
carefully and far ahead, just as you would lay 
your plans before you broke ground for your 
house. And the plans which come before the 
advertising and go along with it and continue be- 
tween insertions and after them — these plans 
are built on the principles behind this tired word 
— merchandising. 

So you see it is a mighty valuable word, after 
all; or, rather, it stands for a mighty valuable 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 143 

idea. The difficulty lies in the use to which it is 
put when a few perfectly simple ideas are placed 
between limp leather covers, tied with pink rib- 
bons and labeled merchandising. If the word 
means simply to buy and to sell, as Webster says, 
then in the name of all that is rational why make 
it mean everything from crystal-gazing to the 
third degree? And why call it merchandising, 
merely to make an impression, when what is 
meant is only advertising based upon carefully 
gathered information or giving advice to a sales- 
manager who knows more about selling his prod- 
uct than any outsider can ever know? 

But the advertising man who used to sell neck- 
wear on the road objects. He refuses to believe 
that any sales-manager knows more than he does. 
When he uses the word merchandising he means 
conducting a sales investigation and formulat- 
ing a sales policy. 

A man who is the active head of one of the larg- 
est and most successful agencies in New York, 
a man whose opinions are respected wherever ad- 
vertising is discussed, was talking the other day 
about investigations. 

" There is only one kind of investigation worth 
a whoop," he said. " That is the investigation 



144 Making Advertisements 

in which the investigators do not know what they 
are investigating! " 

And then he explained more fully. He said 
that his most successful investigations were con- 
ducted in this way: 

One of his men goes to the city which is to be 
the " laboratory." (That's another trick word.) 
An empty room in an office building is engaged 
and advertisements are inserted in the want- 
columns of the local papers, calling for intelli- 
gent men with good character-references, ca- 
pable of asking the trade of a certain line of busi- 
ness a few simple questions. 

The applicants find a bare room in which an 
energetic young man sits in a hired chair at a 
hired table. More hired chairs are ranged be- 
fore him. 

By nine-thirty the investigators are assembled, 
questioned and twenty successful applicants are 
waiting for instructions. 

" Now, men," says the agency's representative, 
" we want you to call on the haberdashers of this 
city. Here is a list of them by routes. We want 
you to have a conversation with each one of the 
merchants on your lists — a conversation about 
collars. Base your conversations on this list of 



Data Hounds 

The data hound is not peculiar to the advertising 
business alone. The ancient Greeks spoke of the man 
who couldn't see the forest because of the trees. 

But in the advertising business there are many 
young men— it is a business itself not yet old. 

These young men do not wish, of course, to accept 
even the obvious — unchallenged. 

And so with the aid of co-tangent and slide rule, a 
great mass of data is compiled to the confusion of the 
new advertiser and the amusement of the old. 

For, after all, the elements of advertising success are 
very simple and very hard. 

Make worthy goods, put your name on them and 
tell many people about them continually for many 
years. For, after all, "psychology" means human 
nature, "potentiality" means human wants, and 
"cumulative effect" means repetition. 

Advertising space in the Butterick publications 
is for sale by accredited advertising agencies. 

Butterick — Publisher 

The Delineator 
Everybody's Magazine 

Two dollars the year, each 



One of the most valuable phases of the Butterick advertising is that it has 
lampooned the foibles of the business. Advertising is just old enough to 
have its wiseacres. 



146 Making Advertisements 

questions, but don't read off the questions or let 
the merchants get the idea that they are being 
cross-examined. Just have a natural, friendly- 
talk about collars, but cover the ground outlined 
by those questions." 

The investigators read over the material which 
he hands them. He assigns the routes. 

" Now is there anything you would like to ask 
about? " he inquires. 

" In these questions four brands of collars are 
mentioned, " says the brightest of the applicants. 
" Which one do you represent? " 

" I'll tell you that when you tell me the an- 
swers to those questions," is the smiling reply. 

The agency does everything possible to avoid 
the dangers of most investigations. If an inves- 
tigator knows what brand he is investigating, too 
often he will frame his questions in a way that 
will force the answer he seeks, just as a magician 
forces a card upon a person in the audience. 

Or, since most merchants are either only too 
eager to agree or too set upon disagreeing, he 
will get a too favorable report or one that is too 
unfavorable, depending upon the humor of the 
dealer and the impression he has been able to 
make. 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 147 

To take an instance of the yes-yes type of 
dealer, the investigator drops in early in the 
morning. The store is practically empty. A 
clerk is wrapping up a suit of underwear for the 
only customer. The boss is looking out over the 
partition at the back of the show-window, whis- 
tling. The investigator noticed that as he studied 
the window. 

" Morning, M r. Robinson," he begins. " Nice 
display of F & X Collars you've got there." 

" Yep. Sell a lot of those collars." 

" Good collars, aren't they? " 

"My trade thinks so. Representing them?" 

" In a way, yes. Not out for orders, though. 
Just want to ask you a few questions." 

" Fire away." 

" The folks who make those collars want to 
advertise them more." 

" Good idea," agreed Mr. Robinson. " Ought 
to be pushed harder. Mighty good collar." 

" What would you think of national adver- 
tising in the big magazines?" 

"Say, that'd be immense! Those people 
never did half enough advertising in a big way. 
Mighty good collar they've got there." 

" And don't you think the magazine advertis- 



148 Making Advertisements 

ing ought to be supported by some local adver- 
tising right here in your local newspaper? " 

" Say ! Now you're talking ! Nothing would 
do me as much good as that." 

"Which paper?" 

" Well, they're all good." 

" But don't you think morning papers would 
be better on a man's proposition like this? " 

" Certainly would. That would help me a 
lot. Mighty good collar they've got there." 

" And how about some hangers for your 
store?" 

"Something catchy? Why, I'd like nothing 
better — and window cards, too, if they were the 
right kind. But those people always do things 
right." 

" You wouldn't advise them to send you a lot 
of sales letters and folders, though, would 
you?" 

" I should say not!" 

" Too busy to read them, aren't you? " 

" Why, I don't get a minute to glance at any- 
thing like that." 

The investigator remembers, for an instant, 
the picture of Mr. Robinson enjoying his leisure 
as he whistled at the show-window, but he also 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 149 

remembers the long list of names of other mer- 
chants on his route. 

"Well, thanks, Mr. Robinson. I'm much 
obliged for all the time you've given me. I 
know the F & X people will be delighted to get 
your opinions." 

" Always glad to see an F & X man any time. 
That's a mighty good collar they've got there." 

The net of that interview will cause the F & X 
sales manager to rub his hands with delight, 
whereas all that it really proved was that a man 
who knew how to ask leading questions had had 
a talk with a dealer who was willing to be 
led. 

But in the next block the investigator encoun- 
ters the other type. He is encouraged by the dis- 
play case of F & X Collars, but his cheery greet- 
ing to Mr. Sanderson does not get a very hearty 
response. 

" Fine lot of our collars you are showing there, 
Mr. Sanderson," he begins. 

" Just a minute," answers that merchant. Al- 
though there is no one else in the store he crosses 
to the opposite counter and starts examining his 
line of underwear and pajamas. The investiga- 
tor follows. 



150 Making Advertisements 

" Got some good news for you, Mr. Sander- 
son, about F & X Collars," he persists. 

" Yeh? " This from below the counter level 
where a search for more boxes of pajamas is in 
progress. 

" Going into a real advertising campaign, they 
are." 

" Heard that before." 

" H-m-m. Before, you say? " 

" Sure. Almost every year those rumors of a 
real campaign get started." 

" But this is no rumor." 

" That's what they all say." 

" Going to begin in a big way." 

" Lots of 'em begin big." 

" In a big way in the big magazines." 

"Whatgood'll that do me?" 

" Why, think of the subscribers to those maga- 
zines who live right here in your town! Look 
at this list." 

Mr. Sanderson glances at the elaborate port- 
folio in which the covers of the magazines are 
reproduced. 

" I never read any of those magazines." 

" But your fellow-townsmen do." 

" Nope. Ain't a magazine town." 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 151 

" Well, what would you think of newspaper 
advertising? " 

" None of the papers here are any good." 

" But they're read, aren't they? " 

11 Not the ads." 

" How do you know? " 

" Oh, well, I know." 

" And the newspaper advertising will be 
backed up by a fine lot of dealer-helps." 

No answer. 

" There'll be window-cards, hangers, leaflets 
to wrap up with your pack — " 

" Say! What do these F & X people think I 
am? Think I'm working in their shipping de- 
partment? " 

" Certainly not. But you will make use of 
good dealer-helps, won't you? " 

" Sure! I sell all that stuff for old paper! " 

Mr. Sanderson's face, for the first time, breaks 
into a smil/e. The investigator pauses. 

" Say, you tell those people of yours," Mr. 
Sanderson goes on, " to put some of their bright 
ideas into their styles. They haven't had a new 
idea since they invented button-holes. Now, 
I'm busy!" 

And when the F & X sales-manager got his 



152 Making Advertisements 

report on that interview he sent a tart memoran- 
dum to the designing department. But did the 
interview prove anything? Only that an ill-in- 
formed investigator had had a talk with a mer- 
chant who never felt well early in the morning. 

Then aren't there any instances in which in- 
vestigations can be valuable? To be sure there 
are. 

A certain manufacturer knew that his com- 
pany was very unpopular with the trade. His 
salesmen told him so, but their report failed to 
agree on the causes. A member of the trade-aid 
department of a certain advertising medium 
called on the merchants of his city independ- 
ently. He got their confidence. He was not 
in the employ of the manufacturer and the deal- 
ers knew it. They talked more frankly to him 
than they ever had been willing to talk to the 
manufacturer's own men. He pinned them 
down to specific complaints. His subsequent 
recommendations led to some changes in the 
local branch office force and to a radical change 
of policy tending toward more generous han- 
dling of returned old merchandise. Today the 
trade's attitude is wholly changed. That manu- 
facturer's goods are sold willingly. 



The Great Mystery — Merchandising 153 



Another manufacturer felt, quite rightly, that 
his own sales organization knew the trade's 
opinions very well indeed. A careful system of 
reports was very conscientiously kept by sales- 
men and " missionaries" and tabulated regularly. 
But this manufacturer wanted to know more 
about the consumer's idea of his product. He 
wanted to know why people bought his product 
and the products of his competitors. 

So his agency's investigators collected the 
opinions of a thousand consumers. They struck 
up conversations in barber-shops, in smoking 
compartments, on street cars. They tabulated 
their results and then went after a second thou- 
sand. It was surprising to see how closely the 
results of the second thousand men coincided 
with the first thousand. And when you get into 
numbers as great as thousands, the law of aver- 
ages begins to take pretty good care of the yes- 
yes boys and the human crabs. 

When a sales organization is weak, there is no 
doubt that an advertising man who has dealt 
with many strong sales organizations can offer 
useful ideas. But his most useful idea would be 
to help strengthen the sales organization. 

The point is that in its eagerness to create a 



154 Making Advertisements 

selling point for itself or to minimize a weak- 
ness in actual advertising ideas of copy and pres- 
entation, an agency is often apt to leap lightly 
over the function for which it primarily exists 
and land on ground rightfully belonging to the 
marketing heads of the manufacturer's business. 
Somewhere in the business itself is an idea so 
simple and tangible that the public will respond 
to it. The advertising man's job is to find that 
idea and then to use all the skill and technique 
and ability at his command to translate that idea 
into terms which the public will understand and 
like and want. He will be reasonably busy if he 
does just that. 



VIII 
LIFTING DEAD WEIGHT 



VIII 
LIFTING DEAD WEIGHT 

In a certain intensive advertising campaign it 
was decided to use every newspaper in a certain 
state. That meant about two hundred dailies 
and five hundred weeklies, taking in most of the 
foreign language papers, including the Scandi- 
navian. 

It was a campaign of propaganda — one of 
the first instances of selling, on a broad scale, an 
idea rather than a manufactured product. There 
were to be three full pages and three half pages 
in the dailies and two pages in the weeklies, all 
appearing within a period of eight days. 

For many reasons the decision to run this cam- 
paign was delayed until the last moment. The 
agency executive entrusted with its preparation 
faced the sobering thought, therefore, that he 
must complete the copy, art work, type-setting, 
electrotyping and shipping of this entire cam- 
paign within eight or ten days from the time that 
he was told to go ahead. 

It happened that although no finished copy 

157 



158 Making Advertisements 

had been written, the subject was engaging the 
public's discussion at that time and the agency 
man had been saturating himself with the argu- 
ments on both sides of the question for many 
months. So it wasn't a matter of digging for 
copy ideas ; rather was it a matter of finding out 
what to throw away. 

So within a day or two the copy had been 
written for ten or twelve possible advertisements 
and the ideas of the illustrations and layout were 
originated at the same time. Out of the lot, 
eight pieces were selected and then the telephone 
wires began to buzz, summoning the artists whose 
work was wanted. 

It was decided not to use the work of any one 
artist, but rather to pick the man or woman whose 
technique was most appropriate to each subject. 
And it was also decided to use real artists — 
every one a high-priced star. 

Some of them had never worked " commer- 
cially " before, and they approached the agency 
with that odd mixture of diffidence and eager- 
ness with a thin veneer of haughtiness which 
artists have adopted in self-defense in the past 
few years when they have been the class of work- 
men upon whose services every propagandist has 



Lifting Dead Weight 159 

cheerfully called without a thought of payment. 
The engraver or printer or lithographer repro- 
ducing the work of the artist has sold his mer- 
chandise like any maker of shoes or underwear. 
But the people creating what he reproduced, 
dealing in those imponderables called ideas and 
technique, have been expected to labor for love. 
And labor they have — with as much love as 
they could muster. 

But when the artists in this instance were told 
that this campaign was on a business basis, and 
when it developed that all of them were thor- 
oughly in sympathy with the ideas to be adver- 
tised, the haughtiness and diffidence died away 
and only eagerness was left. Everything was 
serene until the agency man asked : 

" And now how are you fixed for time? " 

" Pretty well," replied one whose answer was 
typical, " I'm illustrating two stories for one 
magazine and I'm making a cover for another, 
but I should think that in about four weeks — " 

" In four weeks," the agency man broke in, 
" this campaign will be over." 

There was a moment of amazement. The ar- 
tist cleared his throat, accepted a cigarette and 
asked in a puzzled way : 



160 Making Advertisements 

" Just when did you want my drawing, then? n 

" Next Friday." 

" And this is Tuesday? Whew! " 

"Whew is right!" 

But in the end all of them readjusted their 
schedules in some way, like the good souls that 
they are, and by the next Friday the whole col- 
lection was in. 

Meanwhile the copy had been approved with 
its rough layouts. 

From that point there were three ways to pro- 
ceed. A separate piece of typewritten copy 
could have been sent to each newspaper with 
marginal notations specifying sizes and kinds of 
type to be used in setting, the notations corre- 
sponding to others marked upon an accompany- 
ing layout. With these instructions would have 
to be sent an electrotype of the illustration. 

This method was rejected for three reasons: 
Many of the papers had no equipment to set so 
much type. Even if they had, they probably 
wouldn't have the right kind of type and the set- 
ting would be awkward, slip-shod and ineffec- 
tive, and — finally — it would have been neces- 
sary to see proofs for correction and there was 
no time for this. So, as in the case of the man 



Lifting Dead Weight 161 

who told the girl that there were eight reasons 
why he could not marry her and the first one was 
his wife, one reason was enough. 

A second way would have been to have each 
advertisement set by a metropolitan daily and 
then to have matrices made by this paper in suf- 
ficient quantity to supply all the rest. But there 
is only one New York paper with a composing 
room which sets type with enough care and skill 
to satisfy an exacting advertiser. And to put the 
whole mechanical burden upon that one paper 
would have been unfair. And besides, even that 
paper's composing room does not quite measure 
up to the standards of the best job printers who 
have specialized in advertising composition. 

There was one more reason for rejecting this 
second way. Some of the illustrations contained 
delicate lines which would be blurred by some of 
the papers if they printed from plates cast from 
matrices. 

So although the third way involved a great 
deal more expense, it was chosen. Three job 
printers devoting all the time of their establish- 
ments to advertising composition were picked. 
Each one received copy and layouts for three or 
four advertisements. 



1 62 Making Advertisements 

Meanwhile the artists' original drawings had 
been sent to the engravers — those containing 
only pen and ink work to one firm making good 
zinc line cuts and those in which charcoal or 
" wash " were used to another house where spe- 
cially careful halftones could be expected. 

Because the layouts were made accurately it 
was possible for the compositors to set their type 
without waiting for the engravers' plates of the 
illustrations. Space for the picture was left in 
each advertisement and as soon as the plates ar- 
rived from the engravers they were dropped into 
place. 

These days very few intelligent advertisers 
need to be sold on the idea of hand-composition 
by an outside job printer. But occasionally one 
encounters a man who demurs at paying the 
price of having his advertisements properly set. 

Such men as Will Bradley, Benjamin Sher- 
bow, Everett R. Currier and one or two other 
specialists in typography have done an incalcu- 
lable service to advertising in educating advertis- 
ers to want and expect and be willing to pay for 
type-setting that is pleasing to look at and easy 
to read. They have been the landscape archi- 
tects of the printed advertising page. Fortu- 



Lifting Dead Weight 163 

nately their example has been an inspiration to 
many other men who have the sense and taste to 
give typography the serious, conscientious at- 
tention that it deserves. And, unfortunately, 
their example has also attracted a lesser group 
of those who in another profession would be 
called quacks. Apparently it seems very easy 
to sit in a large airy office and charge fees for 
doing nothing but arranging type without even 
touching it. But the results of the work of the 
real ones are the surest indication of the tremen- 
dous amount of technical training and natural 
taste that this new and undercrowded profes- 
sion requires. Typography is especially com- 
mended to the attention of the man with an am- 
bition to enter the advertising business by a door 
that still stands wide open. 

The most successful typographers have small 
patience with beauty for beauty's own sake. A 
long paragraph entirely set in capital letters and 
properly placed upon a page with wide margins 
of white space may be a delight to the eye, but 
it is infernally hard to read. And since the first 
requirement of an advertisement is to get itself 
read, an advertisement which is simply a beauti- 
ful design is not a good advertisement. 



164 Making Advertisements 

Typography's big service to advertising is in 
making advertisements easy to read — by the 
choice of type, by proper spacing between words 
and lines, and by using the right size of type for 
the eye to follow with comfort and pleasure 
along a line of any given length. 

In the offices of most newspapers and many 
magazines there simply isn't time to fuss over 
the little things that make such a big difference 
in the appearance of advertisements. A great 
deal of setting must be done by machine and, 
marvelous as they are, the machines lack the 
niceties and finish of hand work. Also, most 
publishers' composing rooms are woefully lack- 
ing in the few, simple, modern type faces which 
the discerning advertiser has learned to prefer. 
Any number of fancy and unreadable faces are 
usually available, faces that seem to have been 
designed by the same mid-Victorian who 
thought of colored squares of glass for the 
window on the stair-landing in houses with cu- 
polas and tin bath tubs. These scroll-saw types 
are often produced when an interest in typog- 
raphy is evidenced; usually produced with an 
air of "Now I'll give you something nifty." 
And that's what they are. 



Lifting Dead Weight 165 

Meanwhile, that idea-campaign has been left 
suspended in mid-air. It had just been sent in 
sections to three printing offices to be put into 
type. 

When the first proofs were received they were 
corrected and sent back for revision without be- 
ing shown to the advertiser. Corrections of this 
sort are unavoidable even when the most care- 
ful layout has been made. Copy takes on a new 
look when it gets into type. The sense is often 
broken badly by the end of a line. A short line 
at the end of a paragraph sometimes calls undue 
attention to itself. A new and better headline 
often suggests itself when the old one stares out 
at you from a printer's proof. It is frequently 
apparent that a few minor changes in spacing 
will vastly improve the appearance of the ad- 
vertisement. Mechanical changes like these 
are best made before the proof is shown to the 
advertiser so that it will not be necessary to lay 
the proof before him with an outburst of apolo- 
gies. 

With the revisions made the proofs were sub- 
mitted. Because this advertiser was a good ad- 
vertiser he looked them over very carefully, 
offering no snap judgments and evidently reject- 



166 Making Advertisements 

ing a number of miscellaneous suggestions as 
they popped into his head. Finally he asked 
why certain things had been done this way or 
that way. In the end his criticisms were nar- 
rowed down to a very few constructive changes 
— changes which obviously strengthened and 
clarified the advertisements. 

Later the same day revised proofs were shown 
to him. This time there were practically no 
more alterations. 

" All right," he said at the end of this meet- 
ing, " go ahead and shoot! " 

This was late in the afternoon. Ten or twelve 
men were waiting for that word in each of the 
three printing offices. Thirty-five more were 
waiting for it at the electrotyping plant. 

The agency man went from one printing 
office to another in a taxi, personally seeing a 
finally revised proof of each advertisement and 
giving it his O. K. As fast as an advertisement 
was approved the form containing it was locked 
up and carried, in the printer's truck, to the elec- 
trotypers. 

And then in a few hours, through the magic 
of hot copper and lead and felt, the metal of that 
campaign was moulded. The link was cast be- 



Lifting Dead Weight 167 



tween one man's pencil and the presses of hun- 
dreds of newspapers with their millions of 
readers. 

Wagons and trucks began arriving at the 
agency man's office — each loaded with its slabs 
of copper or lead. Messengers staggered back 
and forth from truck to shipping room, where 
hammers were pounding as electrotypes and 
stereotypes were nailed into their wooden boxes. 

Clerks went from table to table, issuing labels 
for the packages and boxes and checking off the 
shipments on their lists of newspapers. 

Other clerks rilled out their order blanks, 
giving the publishers instructions about the dates 
of insertion and telling which piece of copy was 
to run on each day. 

That shipping room could have become bed- 
lam itself without the slightest effort. It was 
noisy enough of necessity, but because plans had 
been laid in advance, because every step had been 
anticipated, a system was working perfectly 
under the apparent confusion. If there was 
noise it was because metal refuses to move itself 
from place to place without noise. 

But by the next evening the weight of that 
campaign's metal was evenly distributed over 



1 68 Making Advertisements 

the press-rooms of hundreds of newspapers. 
And the agency man was as much relieved as if 
he had actually freed his shoulders from those 
tons of copper and lead. 

Compared to most campaigns, this one was 
handled very quickly. And yet it passed 
through all the mechanical stages of a campaign 
prepared at a more normal and leisurely pace. 
Its passage was simply compressed into a shorter 
period. 

But occasionally even greater speed is re- 
quired. A certain series of advertisements was 
once decided upon late in the afternoon of a 
November day. On the following morning the 
first piece of copy appeared in a dozen cities in- 
cluding Ski Francisco and Seattle. 

Everything was sent by telegraph. A long 
telegram was drafted starting with insertion or- 
ders. Then came type specifications, including 
borders, margins, type sizes, spacing and even 
the location of a box of italics. The text itself 
was preceded and followed by the word 
" quote." 

The astonishing part of it was that a week 
later, when all the checking copies of the papers 
were assembled in New York, the variations 



Lifting Dead Weight 169 

among them were so slight as to be negligible. 
They were scarcely greater than they would 
have been if each of the papers had been given 
plenty of time to set and submit proofs. News- 
paper composition may not be as exact as it 
should be, but there are times when speed is the 
first requirement and at those times the newspa- 
per's composing room comes up to scratch like a 
shot. 

An experience with a campaign of large me- 
tallic bulk is very wholesome for any one en- 
gaged in the practice of advertising. It instills 
a new and enhanced respect for the dead weight 
of sheer metal underlying the business. A man 
who has passed through it can never correct a 
proof so thoughtlessly as he did before; he re- 
members that if he tells the printer to take a 
word out of the middle of a paragraph, he may 
be necessitating the resetting of everything in 
that paragraph from that word down to the end. 
Of course if a change should be made, it must be 
made even if it means resetting the whole adver- 
tisement. But printers are paid by the hour 
and they are trained to be very philosophical 
about what they do with their time. If a change 
is marked, it will be made. 



170 Making Advertisements 

Many an advertiser has been astonished to get 
a bill for three or four hours of composition for 
revision when he distinctly remembers having 
changed only two or three words. He forgets 
that the new words were not the same length as 
the old ones. And, as has been said, type is not 
made of rubber and if a word is too long to go 
into a given space, it can't be squeezed in. 

The night city editor in a New York news- 
paper office once handed to a new copy reader 
a proof of a column-long speech. 

" Cut this to three sticks," he said. That 
meant three-eighths of a column. And it was 
within ten minutes of edition time. 

The copy reader went through that speech as 
if he were editing type-written copy. If he saw 
a sentence that could be spared from the middle 
of a paragraph, he marked it out. That proof 
looked like a letter that had passed the censor 
with heavy casualties. The night city editor 
looked over his shoulder. 

" That's type, man," he exclaimed. " You 
aren't editing a manuscript!" And then he 
took a clean proof and cut it down by marking 
out whole paragraphs or the last few lines of 
paragraphs. In the press-room a compositor 



Lifting Dead Weight 171 

made his indicated changes swiftly and surely — 
merely by lifting out whole paragraphs of type 
or the lines at the ends of paragraphs. To make 
the changes marked by the new copy reader 
would have meant entirely resetting. 

The advertiser who wants to change a type 
proof for good reason is certainly entitled to 
have it reset as often as he likes. But if he 
doesn't want to throw his money away and waste 
the productivity of a printing office, he will 
make no changes on whim and he will remember 
that the flirt of his pencil may mean hours of 
lifting and carrying and re-arranging of pieces 
of metal by somebody — and somebody who is 
uncommonly well paid for the effort these days. 

The importance of one of these pieces of 
metal — a very small one — was admirably illus- 
trated recently in the publication of a certain 
advertiser's catalogue. 

The pages containing his price list had been 
checked and re-checked with special care by 
himself, by his advertising manager and by his 
agency's representative. And yet when the first 
copies of his catalogue were delivered to him he 
saw at a glance that a leading article was listed 
at $1.00 instead of $1.50. 



172 Making Advertisements 

His voice fairly crackled as he phoned his 
agency about the mistake. His agency's execu- 
tive reached for the final proofs. There it was 
in the proofs — correct at $1.50. And there it 
was in the finished catalogue — incorrect at 
$1.00. 

The presses were running, the printer re- 
ported, duplicating that mistake as fast as ink 
could touch paper. 

" Stop 'em!" yelled the agency man. And 
after the mistake was corrected and the world 
was being told that it would have to pay $1.50, 
an inquiry was started. 

It was a mystery for several days. Every copy 
of the final proof was right and yet the very 
first finished catalogue was wrong. The printer 
was known to be reliable. When he said 
that he didn't see how it could have happened, 
his word was enough. 

Finally, he called up the agency one day with 
the solution. A little red-headed devil had con- 
fessed — devil being used in its professional and 
not personal sense. Trundling one of the forms 
from composing-room to press-room, this young- 
ster had bumped into a door-jamb. The form 
slid to the floor. A little of the type fell out. 



Lifting Dead Weight 173 

Just then the whistle blew for lunch. The kid 
was afraid of losing his job and prevailed upon a 
good-natured compositor to replace the missing 
type. All of it couldn't be found on the floor, 
so from a set of final proofs the missing lines 
were taken, correctly as they thought. They did 
a good job of it, in everything but that one wrong 
price. 

The agency man trusted the printer and be- 
lieved this explanation. It could have hap- 
pened — just barely. But he couldn't ask his 
customer to take his word for another man's 
word about an incident like that. So all the ad- 
vertiser ever knew was that he finally received 
correct copies of his catalogue to the full num- 
ber of his order. 

That was all that interested him. The agency 
is the connecting link between its advertisers and 
an army of mechanical workers and many tons 
of metal. When an advertiser sees an advertise- 
ment produced by his agency, he considers it as 
the product of the agency. 

And this is as it should be. He doesn't care 
how many processes are involved any more than 
he cares how many sources his lawyer consults 
in the preparation of a brief. It is like holding 



174 Making Advertisements 

an architect responsible for building your house. 
His troubles with plumbers and plasterers and 
carpenters and painters do not interest you. 
You want results. 

An advertiser is not interested in the meander- 
ing habits of printers' delivery boys. He does 
not respond to the details of how a negative was 
spoiled by an engraver. He cares very little that 
a form arrived at the electrotyper's just too late 
to go into the ten o'clock bath. The fact that a 
composing room has none of his favorite type 
makes no difference to him whatever. He hears 
too many alibis in his own business to hear those 
of the mechanical side of advertising. 

He deals with his agency and his agency acts 
for him in carrying the dead weight of sheer 
metal. 



IX 



THE RIGHT WORD IN THE 
RIGHT PLACE 



CHAPTER IX 

THE RIGHT WORD IN THE RIGHT 
PLACE 

A WRITER of fiction may work all of his days, 
if he likes, to develop a style of his own. But a 
writer of advertising must work all of his days, 
and most of his nights, to develop a different 
style for each customer. 

It is perfectly simple when you stop to think 
of it. An advertisement should look and sound 
like the firm which signs it ; not like the man who 
writes it. It should catch the spirit of the ad- 
vertiser's personality and should reflect that per- 
sonality in words that create a proper picture. 
It should create this picture so simply that many 
will grasp it, some will talk about it, and a few 
will act upon it. 

An exclusive jeweler may say: "Your inspec- 
tion is invited." 

A garage-keeper may say : " Come in and look 
us over." 

The words used in the jeweler's invitation 
help to create a picture of dignity, taste and lux- 

177 



178 Making Advertisements 

ury, with a little aloofness as befits an establish- 
ment where everybody isn't welcome. The 
words used in the garage-man's invitation give 
you a picture of a man in jumpers wiping his 
hands on a piece of waste. Try interchanging 
the two invitations and see how inappropriate 
they become. 

Johnson says of Gray's Elegy: "It abounds 
with images which find a mirror in every mind, 
and with sentiments to which every heart re- 
turns an echo." 

If an advertisement can even remotely ap- 
proach that result by its choice of words, the 
argument will have a much easier time of it. 
For the words, with the help of the illustration 
and the typography, set the stage. 

Every one who sells anything knows how im- 
portant it is to get a prospect into the right frame 
of mind. Many successful salesmen diagnose 
moods at a glance. If a man is obviously ner- 
vous, hurried or ill-natured, they get away from 
him without even starting their argument. If 
he is genial, happy about something, at peace 
with the world — that is the time he will buy 
most readily. 

So it is apparent that an advertisement, which 




989 ire* of 
Tny. 97.50 



MEN 



GIFTS for men — gifts 
that surpass in 
acceptability the conven- 
tional box of cigars and 
the unconventional neck- 
ties are always to be had 
at reasonable prices at 
Ovington's. 

OVINGTON'S 

"The Gift Shop of Fifth Ave." 
314 Fifth Av.,near32d St. 



Sheffield dinner coffee sef. 
920.00 to $75.00 

*T*HE stately charm of 
-*• good Sheffield is com- 
pelling when the Sheffield 
is new — but absolutely 
irresistible when you've 
owned it and used it — 
and lived with it. For 
Christmas Gifts it is hard 
to imagine anything finer. 

OVINGTON'S 

"The Gift Shop tfSthAve." 
3l4FifthAv.,near32dSt 

m 



724-BuddhaBoo)tends % Pair$S.50 

MEASURED by time, 
Ovington's is 70 
years old! Measured by 
its wares, Ovington's is 
the newest shop on Fifth 
Avenue. Measured by its 
charm, it is the most 
fashionable shop- — and 
measured by its prices, 
Ovington's is the most 
reasonable. 

OVINGTON'S 

"The Gift Shop of Fifth Avenue" 

314 Fifth Av., near32d St. 



Good taste can often be expressed in small space without loss of strength. 
These newspaper advertisements by T. L. L. Ryan have attracted a great 
deal of attention by selling something and saying something at once. 



180 Making Advertisements 

has no way of readjusting itself to a prospect's 
mood, must also seek to shape its approach in the 
way that will be most likely inviting to the man 
whom it addresses. 

Therefore, besides reflecting the house which 
signs it, an advertisement must reflect the per- 
sonality of the person whom it is designed to 
reach. 

" Price Concessions on Dining Suites " might 
be the caption on a furniture store's advertise- 
ment appealing to people of more-than-average 
means. But " Dining-Room Furniture Cut in 
Two!" would be more likely to interest pur- 
chasers of lower grade merchandise. The 
problem becomes complex as soon as a house of 
established dignity and standing decides to 
widen its market beyond the limits of its limou- 
sine trade. It must decide how it can maintain 
its prestige and still be interesting to a less lofty 
circle. It cannot be merely snobbish, for many 
people are sensitive about trading where they 
fear that they may be snubbed. It must be gen- 
uine, inviting and yet aristocratic — all at once. 

On one of its calendars the telephone company 
urges its customers to be considerate, add- 
ing: " You are judged by what you say and how 





BV SPECIAL APPOINTMENT 





BY SPECIAL APPOINTMENT 

TO THEIR MAJESTIC* 

THE KINO AND UUEtN 

OF THE BELGIANS 



OMNIA OMNIBUS UBIQUE 



I 



ARRODS trade-mark signify- 
ing everything for everybody 
everywhere. Literal as well as 
latin. Store covers half as much again 
as St. Paul's, embraces two hundred 
shops, employs six thousand people, 
sells everything from candies to castles, 
trades with every quarter of the globe 
— a granary, a vineyard, a bank, a de- 
positary, a library, an atelier of fash- 
ions^ saturnalia ofjewels, a caravan of 
silks, a crystal palace of glass and por- 
celains, a tea shop, a tobacco planta- 
tion, a booking office for theatres and 
tours, a bureau of currency exchange, 
a world's fair for the world that fares 
here, and the greatest rendezvous for 
Americans stopping and shopping in 
London. 

HARRODS I™ 

WOODMAN BURBIDGE Managing Director 




When the head of this English house visited America this year, he had 
the good sense to choose an American, Frank Irving Fletcher, to write his 
American copy. 



The Right Word in the Right Place 181 

you say it." When you realize that for every 
one who knows the members of a firm person- 
ally, thousands of people form opinions of it 
r rom its advertising, you see how important be- 
comes the question of " how you say it." 

You can make out lists of words — like charm, 
distinction, breeding, dominate, exquisite, dec- 
orative, culture, replica — which carry an im- 
pression of high prices. You can make out an- 
other list of words — like luck, tinker, sport, 
jump, slip, twist, bounce, which slap you on the 
back. 

Then you can go further and find words for 
" smack-your-lips " copy — like crisp, luscious, 
creamy, delicious, toasted, golden, piping-hot, 
appetizing, flavory, rich, spicy, plump, tender, 
savory, aroma, piquante, tempting, juicy. 

The danger in all this is that a writer of copy 
falls into the habit of using just about the same 
words, or the same sort of words, in every piece 
of advertising that he prepares for an advertiser. 

In a certain advertising agency recently a list 
of words was made up and sent to every man 
writing copy for a Fifth Avenue shop. They 
were told that those words must not appear in 
that advertiser's copy until further notice. The 



1 82 Making Advertisements 

reason was that a distinct style of copy had 
been struck by the man who originated the copy 
and those who came after him thought the best 
thing they could do was to strike the same note 
over and over again. 

But you can't make a melody out of one note. 
And in this advertiser's copy a few words like 
distinction, charm and decorative were sadly in 
need of a rest. When this rest had been ob- 
tained for a while through conscious avoidance, 
a few of them were allowed to creep back. But 
meanwhile the advertiser's vocabulary had been 
notably enriched. 

All of this discussion of suiting the word, 
particularly the adjective, to the copy ought to 
be unnecessary. But unfortunately it isn't. If 
you take the trouble to look you will find the 
same nouns and adjectives used in pieces of ad- 
vertising copy as different as steam shovels and 
steamed puddings, brass polishes and brass beds, 
shoes for men and shoes for motor cars, brake 
linings and skirt linings. 

It's not necessary to strain for an effect in 
order to employ words that are appropriate. 
Too often all of one man's, and even all of one 
agency's, copy sounds alike only because it is 



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When this advertisement occupied a page in the Saturday Evening Post, 
the hand appeared in red. With the headline it told the story at a glance. 
Calkins y Holden have a way of doing that. 



184 Making Advertisements 

based upon no more intimate knowledge of 
products than can be obtained from a study of 
scrap-books containing past performances. 

Take these three headlines : 

" Every Bump a Collision ! " 

" Here's some horse-sense for pipe-smokers." 

" The prettiest, the daintiest, the flimsiest." 

The first one is for a shock-absorber. The 
second is for a pipe-tobacco. And the third is 
for a laundry soap. Every noun in all three is 
appropriate to its product. The first two are as 
essentially masculine as the third is feminine. 
Each one is in character not only with the prod- 
uct but with the person who is addressed. 

The man who wrote the first of the three went 
even further. He employed what the old high- 
brows used to call onomatopoeia and what the 
newer philologists call echoism — " the forma- 
tion of words by imitation of natural sounds." 
Words like hiss, hush, click, jingle, clink, drip 
— yes, and bump — are valuable advertising 
words because they say something and create a 
mental picture at the same time. 

The encyclopedia will tell you that " at one 
time there was an exaggerated tendency to find 
in echoism a principal source in the origin and 



The Right Word in the Right Place 185 

growth of language, ridiculed as the ' bow-wow ' 
theory of language." The job of the advertis- 
ing writer would be infinitely easier if the bow- 
wow method had been followed by those who 
were in charge of manufacturing our language. 
Their copy could be entirely composed of words 
looking and sounding like the ideas behind 
them. Then a colorless word like machine 
would not stand ready to mean anything from a 
hydraulic press to a typewriter. Then an ad- 
jective like charming could not be applied to a 
gown, a hotel and a dessert. It would have 
made advertising much more effective. 

It is both difficult and dangerous, at best, to 
attempt to point out definite ways of achieving 
results in writing advertising copy. Just when 
a rule gets itself comfortably established in the 
minds of most advertising men, along comes a 
bright young copy man in a Western agency who 
proves that the other way works just as well. 
Precedents are acrobats. And in a business 
where the old masters are still able to play a 
very creditable game of golf it is natural that 
most men have worked out their own rules and 
are a little apt to sniff at the ideas of others. 

A salesman for a course in business training 



1 86 Making Advertisements 

goes so far as to say that the only way he can sell 
an advertising man is with this solicitation: 

" Now, I want you to promise me that you 
won't read the volumes about advertising. 
Frankly, I'm sure that you wouldn't agree with 
them. You are working out principles every 
day — just as vital, just as comprehensive, just 
as valuable as any of those described by the au- 
thors of those volumes. But the rest of the 
course will interest you, for there is much that 
you will want to study about the fundamentals 
of cost finding, plant management, accounting, 
corporation finance, investments, shipping, cred- 
its, office organization, real estate, economics, 
banking and other subjects with which you 
aren't so familiar." 

And then he picks up the advertising volumes, 
walks to an open window and says : " Suppose 
we throw these books away now. You could 
write better ones yourself." 

But though concrete recommendations may be 
questioned on most phases of advertising writ- 
ing, in the choice of words there are a few prin- 
ciples which perhaps may be set down with 
safety. 

First it is well to choose words that live today 



The Right Word in the Right Place 187 

/ 

in our national speech. Words which appear 
only in books do not lend themselves to copy. 
They are too selfish. They advertise themselves 
instead of the product. 

Certainly it is preferable to choose words 
which convey an idea without calling attention 
to themselves. Occasionally advertising copy 
gets very pompous — usually without more rea- 
son than to tickle the vanity of the advertiser. 

" There's the idea," one manufacturer used to 
say, after he had explained a selling point to his 
agency's representative, " Now you put in the 
verbiage." And he could never be persuaded 
that a piece of copy was good copy unless it con- 
tained several words which he couldn't under- 
stand. 

Another advertiser once asked one of his buy- 
ers to pass upon a piece of copy. The buyer 
checked up all the prices and, in addition, ven- 
tured to suggest a way in which he thought the 
phrasing could be improved. 

"Never you mind about that!" shouted the 
head of the firm. " I pay that writer $10,000 
a year and I guess he knows grammar! " 

Frequently the writer of advertising encoun- 
ters the business man who likes to declaim copy. 



1 88 Making Advertisements 

He will hold an advertisement at arm's length 
and recite it with the same resounding emphasis, 
and very likely the same gestures, that he em- 
ployed when he won the oratorical contest at 
high school. The temptation to give him ade- 
quate material is very great. But it should be 
shunned if the advertising, and not the adver- 
tiser, is expected to perform. 

Second, a wise course is to choose the word 
which most clearly and swiftly conveys its mean- 
ing. This is not always the short word. Take 
a word like constitute; it is really shorter than 
" Go to make up." Innumerable is shorter than 
" too many to be counted." And yet the longer 
word carries its meaning to the eye more swiftly 
than several short words with the same meaning. 

Adam Sherman Hill gave both of these ex- 
amples in " The Foundations of Rhetoric " 
which every writer of advertising could read or 
re-read, preferably both, with great profit. 

The advantages of short words and long words 
are clearly described. " In a single instance," 
he says, " the gain in time and space is not large; 
but in a chapter or a volume, the saving of one 
syllable out of every twenty or every hundred 
syllables is a great economy." 



The Right Word in the Right Place 189 

Certainly no principle could be more appli- 
cable to advertising. And again: 

" Another way in which short words save a 
reader's time is by diminishing the amount of 
effort needed to get at their meaning. They are, 
as a rule, more readily understood than longer 
words; for they are the familiar names of fa- 
miliar things or of familiar ideas and feelings. 
They belong less to literary language than to 
living speech." 

If there was ever a form of writing which 
ought to belong to living speech, it is advertis- 
ing. For no form of writing was ever intended 
more directly to influence methods of living. 

Third, all good short words do not come from 
the Anglo-Saxon. From Latin origin, Hill 
tells us, come such useful monosyllables as add, 
fact and mob. From the French come cab, 
cash, corps, pork, quart and zeal. Duel is from 
the Italian, cask and cork come from the 
Spanish, gulp and yacht from the Dutch, shawl 
from the Persian, and shrub and tea are from the 
Arabic and the Chinese. When the choice lies 
between an Anglo-Saxon word and one from, 
say, the Icelandic, no doubt the Anglo-Saxon 
will tell its story more quickly, but the writer 



190 Making Advertisements 

who too rigidly confines himself to Anglo-Saxon 
words is like a golfer who uses his irons from the 
tee. The rest of his shots have got to cover a 
lot of distance. 

Fourth, the temptation to decorate copy with 
fine writing should be throttled. Many begin- 
ners in copy-writing are unable to resist the urge 
to write to please themselves. The sentences 
swerve them off the highways of their argument 
and lead them into delightful lanes of self-in- 
dulgence. They forget that they are selling mer- 
chandise and revel in the joys of stringing 
words together like colored beads. 

One such writer was especially persistent in 
writing to please himself. It took months to 
discourage him, to make him see that his copy 
should sell something instead of preening itself. 
Two or three years after he began, his chief 
asked him one day whether he realized how 
much his writing had improved. 

" Sure," he answered, "but it isn't half as 
much fun for me." 

A generation ago the rhetoricians quarreled 
with the newspapers for using " long words in 
order to give an air of magnificence to the petty 
or the mean." Recently this tendency is con- 



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N:21 




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One of a series by the Federal Advertising Agency creating a distinct 
personality. 



192 Making Advertisements 

fined to small town papers, but it is interesting to 
find that Lowell found the newspapers guilty 
of speaking of " a disastrous conflagration " 
when they meant a fire, of " calling into requisi- 
tion the services of the family physician " when 
they meant sending for the doctor, and of " ten- 
dering him a banquet " when they meant asking 
him to dine. 

Hill found in the newspapers of his day the 
same tendency. He found " floral tribute " in- 
stead of flowers, " lack of finances " instead of 
poverty, " itinerant merchant " instead of ped- 
dler, " convertible into cash " instead of money 
value, " united in the holy bonds of matrimony " 
instead of married, and " piscatorial sport " in- 
stead of fishing. And that was nearly thirty 
years ago. 

Today, in advertising, in the attempt to 
throw individuality around merchandise, there 
is a similar danger. You will find a washing 
machine called a mechanical laundress. Men's 
clothes are referred to as exclusive apparel for 
gentlemen. Tailors are called drapers and civil- 
ian clothes are described as mufti. 

Often the use of stately words will be de- 
fended on the ground that they help to create 



The Right Word in the Right Place 193 

atmosphere. But sometimes stilted forms lead 
to trouble as they did in the case of the jewelry 
house which advertised : " Blank & Co. — 
Watches for women of exclusive design and dis- 
tinctive appearance." Don Marquis clipped 
that advertisement for " The Sun Dial," his 
column in the New York Evening Sun, and 
added the heading " So do we all." 

Fifth, foreign words, particularly French 
words, have a use in advertising which would 
not be sanctioned in other forms of writing. In 
fashions the skilful use of French, particularly 
if you make it so simple that the English mean- 
ing can be guessed by most people, helps to com- 
plete the picture. One perfume manufacturer's 
copy was entirely written in French and then, as 
if as an afterthought, the English translation was 
added. It was quite a game for the girls — see- 
ing how much they could understand without 
referring to the explanation. And it helped to 
sell a lot of perfume. A big department store in 
New York goes so far as to use French headings 
for many of its fashion advertisements. It gives 
French names to some of its departments, and 
has French writers on its advertising staff. Why 
not? 



194 Making Advertisements 

Sixth, the use of figurative words has a real 
place in advertising — if you don't mix your 
figures. Our speech today is full of figures of 
speech and a lot of business men do not realize 
that they use expressions which once were 
poetry. 

They speak of driving a bargain, of a sharp 
voice, of fleecy clouds, of a wild idea, of digest- 
ing a report, of a striking remark. And every 
italicised word was first used in that sense by 
some unbusinesslike soul like Shelley or Keats or 
Tennyson. 

From Dr. Johnson's " Life of Addison," Hill 
quotes this passage: 

11 Fired with that name, 
I bridle in my Struggling muse with pain, 
That longs to launch into a nobler strain. 

" * To bridle a goddess,' roars the old Doctor, * is 
no very delicate idea ; but why must she be bridled ? 
Because she longs to launch; an act which was never 
hindered by a bridle: and whither will she launch? 
Into a nobler strain. She is in the first line a horse, 
in the second a boat; and the care of the poet is to 
keep his horse or his boat from singing.' " 

And here are three other instances by less dis- 
tinguished writers: 



The Right Word in the Right Place 195 

" Reports indicate that the backbone of the cold 
wave is broken." 

" Carlo received severe injuries at the hands of 
a bull-dog." 

" A sea of upturned faces was watching the bulle- 
tins, shouting and hissing as each new return came 
in." 

If a figure of speech is intended to create a 
picture before the eye, the difficulty here seems 
to be that these writers were producing a whole 
movie scenario. 

To sum it up, suppose we take a paragraph 
directly front} Hill himself: 

" If, in short, a writer sincerely wishes to com- 
municate to another mind what is in his own mind, 
he will choose that one of two or more words equally 
in good use which expresses his meaning as fully 
as it is within the power of language to express it. 
If he wishes to be understood, he will choose the 
word that points straight to the object it represents, 
and to nothing else. If he wishes also to interest or 
to move his reader, he will choose the word that ex- 
cites the desired feeling, either directly or indirectly 
— by what it means, or by what it suggests through 
the association of ideas. In every case, he will 
choose the word that calls least attention to itself as 
a word, and thus enables the reader to give his whole 
mind to what it signifies or suggests." 



THE CAMPAIGN 



THE CAMPAIGN 

A MAN who was discussing a proposed adver- 
tising campaign said the other day: 

" Now, our business is peculiar." 

That man had^the first qualification of becom- 
ing a regular advertiser. He had grouped all 
business into two classes : his own and others. 

Advertising men hear, from day to day, that 
the furniture business is peculiar, that the book 
publishing business is peculiar, that the china 
business, the insurance business, the shoe busi- 
ness, the real estate business, the collar business, 
the rug business, the men's clothing business — 
that all these businesses are peculiar. To which 
the answer is, of course, that the most peculiar 
business in the world is the advertising business. 

It is most peculiar because it must recognize 
the peculiarities in other businesses without 
being blinded to the great fundamentals which 
underlie all of them. 

All businesses have in common the elements 
of production and distribution. Administra- 

109 



200 Making Advertisements 

tion is a part of production just as selling is a part 
of distribution. 

One manufacturer may send his own salesmen 
direct to the trade and another may sell to job- 
bers and be unable to tell what happens to his 
product after that. One advertiser may manu- 
facture his merchandise from raw materials and 
another advertiser may be only the selling agent 
for a factory or a group of factories. One man 
may advertise a product which is bought every 
day by millions of men or women and another 
may advertise a product which the consumer 
never consciously buys — like the piston ring of 
an automobile cylinder — and which is bought 
once or twice a year by only a handful of men. 

And yet so elastic and powerful is the force 
called advertising that it can be made to serve 
the purposes of all these advertisers in all the 
permutations of their industries. 

One after another the business men of this 
country have discovered that they too can use 
this force which has helped men in other lines 
of business. The history of advertising in this 
country has been the awakening of one industry 
after another. 

For generations bankers thought they couldn't 




Ingenious Mr. B 

How he plans 
to provide for his family 



Mr. B , 33 yrere old. Buried, with two childrea. 
b« .c. unrelated $35,000 is New York ml «UU 



No. that Mr.B. bu made a good start is life. b. 

irll. m be it chiefly concerned about hi* family — 
"in cm* anything eheuld happen." 

Is this frame ofmind. be read recently one of our 
■d'ertieemeuta adsocatisg Tmal Fusda. li Wiped 
bin crystallise -an ides thai be had. Ha cent 



TbJ.U-bal^Mr. B.dld; 
Be put hi. 135,000 int 



In his copy for the Columbia 
Trust Company, J. K. Fraser 
has proved that a bank's adver- 
tisement can be as interesting 
and comprehensive as any 
merchant's. 



i Trurt Fond which pre 



The Treat Company will inrwi the prioeipa] is 
aoood eecurtliee asd collect the tnr oa ie- * ap proij. 
materjr $1800. Out of tbia the Company will par aa 
assuel premium of I132S oa $50,000 life insurance 
which Mr. B. has takes out— a part of hie pUa. 

Xbia leasee a margin of about $475 which to* 
Truit Company will credit to Mr. B'a checking account 



Osbia death, Ur.B'a 
J50.000 insurance plus the salue of the TruH Fund, 
making as assured total of $85,000. 

Bst Mr. B. wae too far-sighted to put the reepoo. 
aibilitv of investing ao large a aurs upon' bia wife. 
instead, be haa arranged is hie will to have bia estate 
'pat la Trust." Thru, through -the Trust Company. 
hie wife wiH rewire t steady income for life. Or. if 
the children should aorrire her. the estate M to be 
divided between them, when, the younger. Bow a Ua» 
girl of three, become* of age. 




202 Making Advertisements 

advertise. Their business was peculiar. There 
would be a run on any institution which so far 
forgot its dignity as openly to solicit business. 
The idea was, apparently, that each bank was 
supposed to hold at all times just as much money 
as it could accommodate without bursting. 

In the past ten years this has changed. Some 
of the most intelligent advertising now appear- 
ing is signed by the strongest financial institu- 
tions in this country. 

Insurance companies are only just beginning 
to emerge, as a class, into the field of advertising. 
Accountants still have more reticence than the 
nature of their work warrants. They are selling 
a service no more confidential than a banker's. 
It is difficult to think of any business which can- 
not be advertised. No, that's an exaggeration. 
Doctors shouldn't advertise ; the good ones have 
more than they can do now and the poor ones 
shouldn't be told how to increase their scope. 
And burglars shouldn't either. It would be 
fatal. That's one business that is peculiar. 
Stock exchange houses have very excellent rea- 
sons for conservatism, but a few of them have 
discovered that it is not necessary to engage in 
bucket shop language in order to do something 



The Campaign 203 



more than converse in code with one another as 
most of them still do. 

As each new industry has emerged from the 
great silence, the pioneers have passed through 
certain stages in their attitude toward making 
advertisements. First their copy was confined 
to the good old " John Jones, M. D." school of 
card advertising. Then some bright bookkeeper 
or useless relative devised a few snappy phrases 
like " Ours is best — why buy the rest? " Com- 
bined with the firm name and the trade-mark 
and set by the printer's devil at the local news- 
paper office this advertising marked a distinct 
advance. Possibly a fancy rule border and one 
or two ornaments of pointing hands or conven- 
tionalized bay trees were thrown in for good 
measure if they were within reach of the young 
compositor. 

Years elapse. Part three will follow imme- 
diately. One day the advertiser sees one of his 
competitors saying something in his advertising. 
This is unprecedented. Inquiry reveals the 
news that an advertising firm has prepared the 
new copy. 

Eventually an advertising man sits in the old 
factory office, listening to the head of the house 



204 Making Advertisements 

as he explains the product's manufacture and its 
sale. 

" Now, the first thing for you to remember," 
he begins, " is that our business is peculiar." 

Then begins the task of getting both view- 
points into the firm's advertising. The manu- 
facturer sees his product from the inside. He 
may be so close to it that he can get no perspec- 
tive on it. That is his danger. The advertising 
man sees the product from the outside. He may 
be so far from it that he has no knowledge of it. 
That is his danger. The problem is to get an in- 
side-outside viewpoint so that the consumer, who 
may be assumed to know nothing whatever about 
the product and to care less, can be told intelli- 
gently how he must come to think about it. 

" We look at the stars," says Sir Rabindranath 
Tagore, " and they seem to be still ; we look at 
the earth and it seems to be flat. Yet we know 
that the stars are rushing through space and that 
the earth is really a ball." 

With one we are too far away, like the con- 
sumer. With the other we are too close, like 
the manufacturer. 

There is a simple and valid reason for the ad- 
vertiser's desire to have his advertising prepared 



Your Speech to the 
Wool Club 

Suppose you are asked to make an address to the 
Tide- Water Association or to the annual banquet of 
the Lapidary Employers' Board. 

It is a matter of great moment; you write and rewrite 
your remarks and rehearse all the details. It may even 
entail a new dress coat and the finishing touches of a 
professional coach. 

And- yet at most, you will actually talk to no more 
than two thousand people directly and perhaps three 
times that number through reprints in the trade press. 

Are you equally careful of your speech to millions 
in the advertising columns? 

Do you employ the best brains without stint to 
prepare your messages? 

These messages of yours do not go to hundreds at 
a banquet-table; they go to millions in the homes, and 
when your chance comes to speak to a whole nation, 
if it be only for two minutes, you ought to have the 
best speech-maker in the nation as your mentor. 

When you advertise nationally, employ experts to pre- 
pare your speech— your message— your advertisement. 

Publishers are in a position to appreciate the best 
work of the leading agencies. 

Advertising space in the Butterick publications 
is far sale ty accredited advertising agencies. 

Butterick— Publisher 

The Delineator 
Everybody's Magazine 

Two dollar* the year each 



The newspaper campaign of Butterick, conceived and mostly written by 
Stanley Latshaw, has done incalculable good for Advertising. In words of 
one syllable it has explained the sound fundamentals of the business with 
vigor, simplicity — and a smile. 



206 Making Advertisements 

by some one trained in observation and in writ- 
ing. It is this : 

You put an advertisement in a newspaper or a 
magazine and it immediately goes into competi- 
tion with the best writing brains of the country. 
More than that, the writers of editorial material 
have an advantage at the start. The public buys 
the newspaper or the magazine for its editorial 
contents. 

Now imagine an advertisement coming in 
competition with the human, timely, vivid words 
in the headlines and columns of a newspaper or 
with the stories, articles and pictures of the high- 
est paid authors and artists in the country. 

The trained writer of advertising applies to 
business the same knowledge of human emotions 
that the newspaper man applies to current events 
and the author to fiction. Imagine such an ad- 
vertisement written by a man whose chief exer- 
cise in composition consists of dictating letters 
that start: " Yours of the tenth at hand and in 
reply would say." 

Yet the writing of advertising looks easy. It's 
one of those jobs which every man in his heart 
thinks he could do better than the man who's do- 
ing it — like running a hotel, producing a musi- 



The Campaign 207 



cal comedy and editing a newspaper. A dis- 
tinguished author once told about writing an ad- 
vertisement for a friend who manufactured tooth 
brushes. He said that for days he wrestled with 
himself for the very salvation of his soul before 
he produced anything he would show. And 
when he finally showed it do you think it was 
used? It certainly was. But that author con- 
fessed that no essay or short story that he had 
ever written called for thinking of so many 
things at once as that advertisement, and he 
honestly believed that it was one of the best 
pieces of writing he had ever done. 

He said so very frankly, for he was not afflicted 
by the curious patronizing attitude which many 
persons of limited literary ability feel, or affect 
to feel, toward commercial work. There is a 
certain type of mind which feels that it con- 
stantly must vindicate itself on its contact with 
business. In some newspaper offices and pub- 
lishing houses this attitude may be traced back 
to the day when the " must " order from the busi- 
ness office was received by the editorial depart- 
ment in righteous indignation. 

Today it is usually a pose assumed by persons 
who feel that a disorderly desk is a mark of in- 



208 Making Advertisements 

tellect and that a knowledge of the simple funda- 
mentals of business is to be disowned. It is an 
odd survival of the day when a person who wrote 
was regarded as queer and believed that he must 
live up to his part. 

There are numberless men of high attainments 
now engaged only in commercial writing — men 
who, like the editorial writers of newspapers, are 
satisfied to remain anonymous because their 
greatest pleasure is the knowledge of the influ- 
ence that they are exerting over their fellow- 
men. 

Occasionally an artist who finds that he cannot 
support his family by drawing for the editorial 
pages seeks to enter the advertising field with an 
apology for prostituting his talents. He finds 
the field in the possession of very astute business 
men who look like lawyers or bond salesmen or 
any other group of aggressive, clean-cut business 
men and whose ability to draw is in inverse ratio 
to the length of their hair and ties. 

They give value for value received. They 
make a picture according to specifications just as 
an architect makes his plans to suit the family of 
his client. They assume that advertisers are ra- 
tional human beings who pay well and expect 



The Campaign 209 



sensible cooperation instead of temperament. 
The entrance of some of our greatest painters and 
illustrators into advertising work has completely 
changed the aspect of our bill-boards. 

Recently a magazine writer with a large na- 
tional following decided that the unsettled life 
of a free lance was not building anything for 
him. His earlier training had been in a pub- 
lishing house where he had observed the mak- 
ing of advertisements. He decided to enter the 
advertising agency business. m 

A friend of his asked him why in the world he 
should go into a business of so many perplexi- 
ties and worries when he had already reached 
a point of literary independence. This was his 
answer : 

" I know that very likely I can always find a 
market for my stories. But I'm tired of living 
in a world of unrealities. Business today is the 
most fascinating study on earth. Contact with 
men who are originating business projects, 
changing the habits of their countrymen, fighting 
through difficulties, is infinitely more worth- 
while than sitting off somewhere alone writing 
about imaginary people doing imaginary things." 

And today that man finds greater satisfaction, 



210 Making Advertisements 

he says, in writing the story of a great business 
institution's progress than he ever found in pur- 
suing Mabel and Harold through the vicissitudes 
of their courtship to the end of the chapter. 

There are at least three ways to write adver- 
tising. One is to read all the printed matter 
previously written about a subject, go through 
all the scrap-books of advertisements already 
run, and then rewrite the material thus obtained. 

Some men honestly feel that they can do their 
best work in this way, for they say that they can 
build upon the work already done by others. 
Certainly there is something to be gained by dis- 
covering what not to do, but if a man's inquiry 
preliminary to writing copy is confined to study- 
ing precedents, he will have difficulty in getting 
a fresh viewpoint. He will find phrases sticking 
in his mind. Angles of approach devised by 
others and proved moderately successful will 
keep looming up. 

Another way is to depend upon inspiration. 
There may have been a time when the prepara- 
tion of copy could be done by inspiration. 
Horn-rimmed glasses had quite a vogue in our 
best copy departments. There may have been 
a day when an advertising writer could look at 



The Campaign 211 



the ceiling a moment, jot down a few quick 
words and then exclaim: 

" There, Mr. McGillicuddy ! That'* the best 
possible slogan for your kippered herring!" 
But that day has passed. Today advertisements 
have to sell goods and create good will. 

A few years ago an advertising man opened 
an agency in which the chief attraction was an 
art department in which all the artists were 
ranged at drawing boards beside the windows, 
all dressed in sky-blue smocks and wearing Per- 
sian orange tam-o'-shanters. This advertising 
man called his office his " study." He said that 
these surroundings helped him find inspiration. 
But, as a general thing, a musical comedy back- 
ground cannot be said to be conducive to good 
copy. 

The third way is to start fresh. See the fac- 
tory. Try the product. Learn to know the men 
who make it. Try it out on people. Find out 
for yourself how good it is. Get excited about it. 

Then, instead of having a campaign seem like 
a chore that must be done, it will simply be a 
question of how soon and how fast you can get 
your ideas down on paper. 

In the newspaper business it is recognized that 



212 Making Advertisements 

a man who gets his facts at first-hand can write 
with infinitely greater vividness than a man who 
doesn't. Men in the office are sent out on assign- 
ments to see and hear with their own eyes and 
ears. 

" Were you there? How did he look when 
he said that? What kind of place does he live 
in? Did you see his family? How old a man is 
he? Does he look prosperous? " the city editors 
ask. Just as direct and intimate questions about 
a product ought to be answered by an advertis- 
ing writer before he sits down to write. 

Many advertising men have come to believe 
that a lot of sincerity and strength may be miss- 
ing from advertising copy if one man talks to 
the advertiser and another man writes the copy. 
All the fire and inspiration of personal contact is 
lost. Instructions are often misinterpreted. 
Too frequently the object is to get an O. K. on 
an advertisement rather than to make it sell mer- 
chandise and create an accurate picture of the 
business's personality. Certainly it is safer to 
say that a sincere note will be obtained at first 
hand. 

After the maker of advertisements has dug out 
his facts, visualized and planned his advertise- 



The Campaign 213 



ments, assembled his layouts and written his 
copy — then comes the most critical time in the 
life of an advertisement. It is when he sits down 
with the advertiser to go over what has been pre- 
pared. 

In every field in which writing is done, except 
advertising, revision is quite as much a matter of 
training as creation. 

Chester Lord, who was for thirty-five years 
managing editor of The Sun, said the other day 
that he had known only three or four good copy- 
readers in his experience. 

" To change another man's writing," said he, 
" and do it constructively, a man must put him- 
self into the writer's attitude of mind — snap- 
ping out a word here or touching up a phrase 
there. Merely to make it conform to your own 
ideas isn't editing. You must keep the best and 
cut only the deadwood ! " 

No one will ever know how many brilliant 
copy ideas have been lost to the advertisingworld 
only because the wrong man had the power of 
life and death, chiefly death, over them. When 
a startling idea appears in a concern's advertis- 
ing, something as new as " Spotless Town " or 
the " Prince Albert " smoking tobacco series, ad- 



214 Making Advertisements 

vertisers immediately shout: " That's the sort of 
thing we want! " 

Yet many advertising men will tell you that 
when they suggest radical innovations in an ad- 
vertiser's copy, the usual first comment is: 
"Well, you know this is a very conservative 
house and we have to be very careful to preserve 
our dignity." One agency man once said that 
advertisers had two reasons for refusing copy — 
either that it had been done too often or that it 
had never been done before. 

But the answer seems to be that too many new 
ideas are submitted in a half-baked condition 
and that the man entrusted with spending the 
hard-earned cash of his firm is not willing to 
spend it on anything of doubtful soundness. 
When an idea is right, even if it is new, when its 
originator knows that it is right and is prepared 
to fight for it, there is no difficulty about getting 
the advertiser's approval unless he has the busi- 
ness stamina of a jelly-fish. 

Of course every man is his own favorite author 
and it takes a pretty broad-gauged citizen to see 
that another viewpoint or style may be quite as 
good as his own. But there is a sound reason for 
an advertiser to permit the best to remain in ad- 



The Campaign 215 



vertising copy if he is convinced that it has been 
conscientiously prepared. 

That reason is that the trained writer knows 
how his writing will sound to the man who reads 
it cold. Training in writing enables a man to 
express thought to another. The untrained 
writer knows perfectly well what he thinks, but 
from what he writes an outsider has no way of 
telling. 

Words have values like notes in music, like 
colors in painting. Training shows a man what 
values are transmitted to other people. 

But to know what value words will have to 
other people means that you must also know what 
sort of people you are addressing. 

Two men were duck-shooting — one a sea- 
soned sportsman and the other out for his first 
bird. They looked up and saw a cloud of ducks 
above them. 

"Help yourself !" the veteran said. The 
novice fired. Not a feather fluttered. 

" How in the world could I miss all of them? " 
he exclaimed. 

" You didn't pick your duck," was the answer. 
" You fired at the whole flock." 

If an advertisement is to contain the con- 



21 6 Making Advertisements 

sumer's viewpoint it must be made with a knowl- 
edge of the consumer's personality, sex, tastes, 
location and habits. You can't sell anything to 
Canadians by showing them returning soldiers 
wearing American uniforms. 

George Ade, who is a master in narrowing 
down a whole class to one human being, starts 
one of his Fables like this : 

" The owner of a Furnishing Store gave em- 
ployment to a Boy with Dreamy Eyes, who took 
good care of his Nails and used Scented Soap 
and carried a Pocket Looking-Glass." 

The maker of advertisements reverses the 
process. A fiction writer picks out the qualities 
common to thousands of people and presents 
them in a character whom every one recognizes. 
An advertising writer thinks of a person who is 
typical of a class and addresses him so pointedly 
that the message reaches out and touches thou- 
sands of other people. 

One of the most vital facts for an advertising 
man to remember is that he must never let him- 
self lose the consumer viewpoint which he had 
before he started studying a product. 

Recently an advertising man carried home 
some proofs of a campaign on rugs. He told 



The Campaign 217 



his wife that he was thinking of buying two or 
three of those rugs for their house. She read 
through several of the advertisements and then 
asked : 

" What sizes are these rugs and how much do 
they cost? " Those proofs were corrected the 
next day. 

Habit or traditions may lead a manufacturer 
to omit from his copy some of the most important 
information. Unless the advertising man is very 
careful he will find himself slipping into the 
sophisticated attitude of the manufacturer. 
The more conscientious he is about digging into 
his subject, the greater is his danger. 

An advertising man was invited to talk to the 
vice-president of a bank about his institution's 
advertising. They had several talks and the 
plans were taking shape. 

One day the advertising man walked into the 
bank with a very fat book under his arm. It was 
an exhaustive reference volume on the methods 
and practices of banking. 

" What on earth are you going to do with 
that? " asked the banker. 

" I'm going to study it," was the answer. 
" Then I won't have to ask so many questions." 



2i 8 Making Advertisements 

" Yes, and then you won't be any better off 
than we are," said the vice-president. " Ask us 
all the questions you want to. But don't get 
smothered in technicalities. We want you to 
keep on thinking like a depositor — not like a 
teller." 

So the book was never read. And the adver- 
tisements were. 



XI 
IDEAS ON IDEA ADVERTISING 



XI 

IDEAS ON IDEA ADVERTISING 

YOU probably have a favorite morning or eve- 
ning newspaper which you read because — as 
you occasionally explain to some one — it has 
such good editorials. 

How many of those editorials have you read 
this week? Unless you are very different from 
most people you mean to follow the editorial 
page very closely, and perhaps you think you do, 
but the fact is that you dip into it only occasion- 
ally. You sample it now and then just to see that 
the flavor hasn't changed. But the days on 
which you actually read it through column after 
column — aren't they mighty few? 

And yet in every newspaper office is an earnest 
group of conscientious and intelligent gentle- 
men, searching out information, weighing 
opinions, polishing sentences which eventually 
reach a mighty small fraction of that newspa- 
per's readers. 

It's not the fault of the editorial writers. It's 
the fault of the newspaper's composing room. 

221 



222 Making Advertisements 

Newspapers' editorials are set in type that is too 
small, and they are too badly displayed. 

There is an editorial writer whose utterances 
appear in a chain of evening papers and who is 
credited with receiving a salary of $100,000 a 
year. Yet it is said that for several years this 
man's editorials appeared without exciting the 
slightest comment. It was not until they were 
moved to the back page and set in type two sizes 
larger than the type in the adjoining columns 
that his reputation started to grow. Then peo- 
ple began to discover the art in his simplicity, the 
strength of his words of one syllable. 

Meanwhile most of the other editorial writers 
of the country remain anonymous and obscure — 
not because many of them may not have so much 
ability as this man, but because they are buried. 
It is as if an orator worked himself into a froth of 
emotion, threw out both arms, opened his mouth 
and then — whispered. 

And that is why we occasionally see the voters 
of a city or a state or the whole country voting 
exactly as the press told them not to vote. Com- 
pelling arguments were assembled, the logic was 
irrefutable, the rhetoric was glorious — but the 
editorials simply weren't read. 



J would found art institution where any person 
*^can find instruction in any subject "—£«•« Cornell 

A pioneer in industry was Ezra Cornell; and a path- 
finder in education as well. Hard-headed, self-made, 
practical old man, he wanted to leave his money where 
its power would be multiplied through the centuries, in 
the lives of college-trained men. So he founded Cornell 
University to be a "producer of producers." 

As a university it was the pioneer in emphasizing the 
importance of applied science in the life-training o» 
men It was the pioneer in being wholly non-sectarian. 
It is pioneering still in adopting the unusual course of pre- 
senting, through advertising, its gnat need to the far 
sighted business men of America,who know that the future 
of every important enterprise depends upon trained men. 
Cornell, with twice as many students as her endowment 
can providefor, with Professors paid less than many skilled 
laborers, must somehow be helped to provide those men. 

She must have $10,000,000 if she is to goon. 

Producer ^Producers I 

She Muse go oof 



CORNEL L 

This ii*e rfjserrient, die first of a series, Is piid for by t 
friend of Corneii University through the 

New York Cornell Endowment 
Committee, j i i Fifth Ave. 



Cornell was sold to the New York public, as well as to its own alumni body, 
by Bruce Barton in this, the first paid advertising campaign ever used by 
an American University. 



224 Making Advertisements 

Therein lies one of advertising's greatest op- 
portunities for development in the next ten years 
— the development of advertising to influence 
public opinion. This kind of advertising is as 
little advanced today as commercial advertising 
was twenty years ago. 

Yet, after all, isn't it merely an extension of 
principles already proved in advertising? 
Every sort of advertising influences public 
opinion and changes habits of mind. Advertis- 
ing has changed American habits of eating, of 
dressing, of amusement, of building and furnish- 
ing homes. Why shouldn't it change habits of 
thinking? 

Roughly this kind of advertising up to the 
present time can be divided into two classes — 
that which is in the public interest, like the war 
campaigns about food and welfare work and 
more recently the church campaigns; and that 
which is in the private interest of corporate 
bodies, like the campaigns of the traction com- 
panies for higher fares, or the information sup- 
plied by the packers about their profits, or the 
telephone company's effort to reduce useless 
calls. 

It seems that thus far the campaigns in the 



Ideas on Idea Advertising 225 

public interest have been more successfully 
handled than the efforts of private concerns. 

No better full-page advertisements were ever 
prepared than some of those sent back from 
France by the staff of The Stars and Stripes for 
one of the Liberty Loans. Early in the war the 
advertising profession was organized under Wil- 
liam H. Johns as chairman of the Advertising 
Division of the Committee of Public Informa- 
tion, and the business principles which had been 
selling biscuits and shoes and dictating machines 
were put to work to build ships and catch spies 
and raise funds. 

Even in political advertising there have been 
flashes of intelligence, though for the most part 
the advertising of issues and candidates has in- 
dicated too little knowledge of the difference 
between editorial writing and advertising writ- 
ing, too much hurry and too much self-glorifi- 
cation. 

Perhaps political advertising originated in a 
day when the political party subsidized the pa- 
per which favored it. Believing that it might 
as well get something for its money, or perhaps 
to make the campaign records look better, the 
party took some space and made a splurge. 



226 Making Advertisements 

It didn't matter much what went in that space. 
That has been the great trouble with political ad- 
vertising. It has been turned over to an al- 
ready over-worked press agent who threw to- 
gether anything that occurred to him at the last 
moment. It was hurriedly set by the newspaper 
and appeared on the following morning with 
about twice as much in it as anybody could pos- 
sibly read. 

It's been only recently that politicians have 
realized that advertising can help them sell their 
arguments. They wouldn't think of sending out 
a stuttering campaign speaker. They know that 
training is needed to take the stump. Now they 
are seeing that the same training that sells mer- 
chandise can sell ideas; and that those ideas can 
be political ideas as well as business ideas. 

If advertising space is used by candidates for 
the simple, convincing presentation of their talk- 
ing points, instead of for mud-slinging, it can 
create a favorable impression of a personality 
just as it creates a favorable impression of a 
brand of merchandise. 

The trouble with much of the good-will ad- 
vertising done by the corporations seems to be 
three-fold : It waits until the eleventh hour be- 



Ideas on Idea Advertising 227 

fore it appeals to the public; it has an apologetic 
tone, and it sounds too selfish. 

There are conspicuous exceptions, the most 
frequently quoted being the long and consistent 
campaign of the American Telephone and Tele- 
graph Company. 

Years ago this company started telling the 
public about the telephone, and today, even in 
the tangles of readjustment to a peace-time basis, 
the public has a great fund of patience and kind- 
liness for the crippled service. In this advertis- 
ing there was no idea of waiting until adverse 
legislation seemed imminent. One interesting, 
broad-visioned view of the telephone's service 
to the country has followed another. With a 
background like this it is not necessary to cringe 
with an apology when an emergency arises. 

The day before the Brooklyn street-car strike 
began the telephone people, anticipating the 
number of Freds who would have to phone the 
Helens that they couldn't get home for dinner, 
asked the public not to rush to the phones. Im- 
mediately after a munitions explosion in New 
Jersey the telephone company devoted its space 
to telling that the lines were blocked by curiosity- 
calls put in by people who simply wanted to 



228 Making Advertisements 

know what had happened. As a result, the work 
of calling doctors and nurses was delayed. The 
telephone company simply told the facts. The 
public's good will toward the company dispelled 
any idea of resentment. The right idea of the 
company had been started years before. 

The other day a group of men were discussing 
the latent possibilities in the idea of a non-parti- 
san, publicly controlled advertising bureau to in- 
fluence public opinion on all sorts of subjects. It 
could check unwise tendencies, big and little. 
It could sow constructive ideas in millions of 
minds every day. 

Suppose this public advertising bureau started 
with business manners. It could make people 
stop having their operators call other people on 
the phone and hold them until the man who 
started the call gets ready to talk. It could 
abolish the use of the word conference. 

" Sorry, but Mr. Jenkins is in a conference," 
says his secretary. The fiction still persists in 
spite of the general knowledge that Mr. Jen- 
kins's conference usually consists of telling his 
assistant that he made the eleventh hole in three 
yesterday. 

It could make everybody keep to the right on 




-An Advertisement by 
The Pullman Company 



Courtesy. ! " the intr ,°- 

•^ auction to the 
book of instruction for Pullman 
employes occurs the phrase: "The 
most important feature to be ob- 
served at all times is to satisfy and please passengers," 
and again, "the reputation of the service depends as 
much upon the efficiency of employes as upon the 
facilities provided by the Company for the comfort 
of its patrons." 

Such personal service cannot be instantly developed ; it 
can be achieved only through years of experience and the 
close personal study of the wide range of requirements of 
twenty-six million passengers. 

To retain in the Pullman service experienced car em- 
ployes of high personal qualifications, pensions are provided 
for the years that follow their retirement from active service, 
provision is afforded for sick relief assistance and increases in 
pay are given at regular intervals with respect to the num- 
ber of years of continuous and satisfactory employment. 

A further inducement in which civility and courtesy are 
counted of great importance, is the award of an extra month's 
pay each year for an unblemished record. As a result, a 
large percentage of Pullman conductors and porters are 
qualified by many years of experience to render passengers 
the highest type of personal service. 



An advertisement may be used to sell nothing but service. Joseph Hus- 
band of Husband £ff Thomas has made us all forget that we ever met an auto- 
cratic Pullman conductor or that the porter achieves a complete reversal of 
form just before tip ping-time . 



Ideas on Idea Advertising 229 

stairways and on sidewalks. It could abolish 
speeding on our streets, just as intelligent adver- 
tising of Safety First has minimized the number 
of factory accidents. It could wipe out the hat- 
checking nuisance and washroom tipping. 

It could go right into people's homes and give 
husbands and wives something to talk about in 
the evenings. There would be a lot less unhap- 
piness if advertising showed the tired business 
man how uninteresting he is to his wife and if it 
showed her what obstacles he overcomes every 
day, how many cranky people he meets, what 
disappointments he has to face and keep on smil- 
ing. 

Think how it could develop and encourage 
the reading of books. Think how interest in 
good plays, even the civic drama, could be de- 
veloped. Think how the question of personal 
hygiene could be presented as it never was before 
except in the Government's educational cam- 
paign to soldiers. 

Now in all this is one underlying idea. It is 
to give a person the other fellow's viewpoint. 
Most people are good people when you get to 
know them. You have probably had the ex- 
perience of disliking a man intensely the first 



230 Making Advertisements 

time you met him. After you got acquainted, 
after you found out what difficulties he had to 
overcome, how sincerely he was trying to do his 
best, you probably forgot your dislike and began 
to admire him. Unless a man makes friends 
very easily he is constantly revising his opinions 
of his fellow men. 

The purpose of advertising to influence public 
opinion is to give people the other man's view- 
point. 

Most of the work of this sort has been done by 
publicity men through the news columns. Idea 
advertising is still at the stage where business 
men used to be willing to pay anything for a free 
write-up in their local paper. 

There seems to be a feeling that motives will 
be suspected if the advertising columns are used. 
People who want to sell ideas are still apt to pre- 
fer to be anonymous — to make it appear that 
the newspaper is sponsor for the thought. That 
has two obvious disadvantages. First, the re- 
action is always adverse when the real sponsor is 
discovered. And second, propaganda in the 
news isn't seen by as many people, isn't as effect- 
ively presented and doesn't tell a person that he 
is expected to do something about it. A press 



Ideas on Idea Advertising 231 

bureau sends you a clipping about yourself from 
your morning paper. Mounted on a slip it looks 
quite impressive. You wonder why you didn't 
see it. The reason you didn't see it was because a 
good advertisement in the next column com- 
pletely overshadowed it. After a man's name 
appears in the papers he is always surprised that 
more people don't speak to him about it. They 
just didn't see it. 

Suppose that all the tools employed in selling 
merchandise were employed in selling ideas. 
Suppose that the business men of the East told 
their story to the farmers of the West and that 
the farmers reciprocated. There could be no 
civil strife in a country where a perfect mutual 
understanding was promoted by an exchange of 
temperate, sound, convincing, sincere advertis- 
ing copy. 

Think what this country could do if it sold 
itself as a nation to Mexico and to Japan. Those 
countries are full of people who, like us, are try- 
ing to buy food, raiment and shelter for their 
families. Our problems differ only in the de- 
tails. 

You remember that Mark Twain said that 
everybody talks about the weather and nobody 



232 Making Advertisements 

does anything about it. That is exactly the pub- 
lic attitude toward the self-centred radicalism 
that made Russia the grimmest joke of the cen- 
turies, that makes the front page of our papers 
look like a convention of walking delegates. 

This country is composed of people who act 
sensibly when they are informed. The masses 
of the people have never been told in simple, 
direct language about the problems of capital. 
An American who was in Russia when the 
monarchy was overthrown says that peasants and 
soldiers came up to him on the street to examine 
his hands. If the nails were clean they called 
him an aristocrat. Conceptions no less ridicu- 
lous are circulated about men of means today 
and the men of means aren't telling how ridicu- 
lous it is. The masses have never been shown 
clearly where all this turmoil will lead them and 
their children unless it is stopped. 

A kettle boils at the bottom first. Heat has 
never been applied to the radical kettle where it 
will count. 

There are two stories to be told to this country 
and advertising, and only advertising, can tell 
them. One consists of a few plain home truths 
about economics and the way it affects Bert and 



Ideas on Idea Advertising 233 

Mike and Tessie just as much as it does their 
bosses. The other consists of a vivid picture of 
the misery, pestilence and death that the wild red 
thing brings with it. 

With those two ideas sold to the public of all 
incomes in short, continuous advertisements, 
well-illustrated and well-displayed, nothing can 
happen to this country. 

Such a campaign would be not in the interests 
of any class or group, not even in the interests of 
the Government, in the sense of the party now in 
power. It would be in the interests of just one 
thing — the American form of government 
which, with all its faults, looks mighty good to 
Americans after the past four years. 



XII 
WHERE IS ADVERTISING GOING? 



XII 
WHERE IS ADVERTISING GOING? 

JOHN PLAINFIELD sits down in front of the fire 
after breakfast on Sunday morning and lights 
his pipe and opens his paper. He is an ideal 
prospect for the shirt sale advertisement on page 
sixteen. He has the money, the discrimination, 
and he is open-minded about shirts. But just 
as he reaches page fourteen his wife calls down: 

" John, dear, won't you see what's the matter 
with the back door? It won't latch." And 
John, like the dutiful husband he is, goes to fix 
the door. 

And he never returns to that section of the pa- 
per. And all the thought, time, energy and 
money put into that shirt sale advertisement is 
wasted so far as John is concerned. 

If there are enough Johns who are fond of 
their wives and enough broken back doors that 
Sunday morning, only one thing can happen. 
The advertising manager will send for his assist- 
ants on Monday morning and say: 

237 



238 Making Advertisements 

" Our copy for that shirt sale was rotten." 
Whereas the copy may have been superb and the 
real fault may have been in advertising to the 
Johns on Sunday, when they are subject to dis- 
tracting assignments of work from the Janes. 

Jane Plainfield, the following Tuesday after- 
noon, settles down comfortably with the newest 
issue of her favorite fiction magazine and a box 
of chocolates. It being a rainy afternoon she 
decides to finish both of them. 

On page 287 is an advertisement of a new 
vacuum cleaner and Jane is so sure that she needs 
one that she has put it on her shopping list for 
tomorrow. But just as she reaches page 285 the 
door-bell rings and here are Helen and Mabel 
with their knitting and an earnest desire for con- 
versation. 

So Jane never sees page 287 and tomorrow she 
goes to town and buys the vacuum cleaner which 
the salesman wants to sell her instead of the one 
which the advertiser on page 287 wanted her to 
buy. And if enough of these rainy afternoons 
are interrupted by calling knitters, the adver- 
tising manager of the vacuum cleaner company 
will show his agent the record of inquiries from 
Mrs. Plainfield's favorite magazine and will say 



Where is Advertising Going? 239 

sadly: " I'm afraid you folks aren't giving our 
stuff enough punch." 

It's exactly like golf. So many things in life 
are like golf. You may practise your follow- 
through half a dozen times until you know ab- 
solutely that your club head goes out straight 
ahead in the direction of the green. And then 
you hit the ball and because you turned your 
wrist a shade too much or moved your body 
ahead of your swing or looked up or made one of 
a dozen other mistakes, the ball bounces along 
the ground — topped! And you blame your 
follow-through, whereas the trouble was with 
your feet or your head or your eyes or your tim- 
ing. 

The psychologists tell us that experiments 
show that a cat's digestive organs go on strike 
when a dog enters the room. If fear has that 
effect on a cat, think what anger, envy, jealousy, 
hunger, poverty, laughter, ambition and any 
other sensation can have on a human being; and 
on advertising. 

A flesh-and-blood salesman can draw away 
when he sees that his prospect is not in an ap- 
proachable mood. And he approaches only 
those who are apt to buy. But a printed sales- 



240 Making Advertisements 

man, an advertisement, blunders right ahead and 
goes after the sale of nursing bottles to old bache- 
lors, adding machines to debutantes, perfumes 
to bellboys, condensed milk to financiers, fishing 
tackle to dear old ladies and so on — all because 
people, thus far, read each other's magazines 
and do not permit themselves to be card-indexed 
according to sex, age, taste and income. 

So you find men commenting on advertise- 
ments in magazines intended only for the eyes of 
their wives and failing to see advertisements 
in business men's magazines. And you hear 
women describing products advertised to their 
husbands. People simply don't behave accord- 
ing to specifications. 

When advertising can drop all human beings 
into their proper filing envelopes and can ar- 
range to be seen only under the most auspicious 
circumstances, then copy will have its true test. 

Meanwhile progress is being made. An ad- 
vertisement does its best to select its own audi- 
ence by its looks. Just the appearance of an ad- 
vertisement will attract some people and repel 
others. If the right ones are attracted and the 
wrong ones are repelled, or left neutral, a good 
start has been made. Advertisers know this and 



Where is Advertising Going ? 241 

practice it. The same piece of copy would not 
be inserted in the Ladies* Home Journal and, 
say, the Police Gazette. But too often the dif- 
ference between audiences is not sufficiently ap- 
preciated. And one of the most wholesome 
trends of advertising is to adapt the looks and 
sound of an advertisement to the type of person 
who is believed to dominate the medium's circu- 
lation. 

The readers of some magazines seem to have 
formed the habit of sending for booklets. The 
readers of other magazines very rarely write for 
anything. If the same advertisement is ad- 
dressed to both audiences, it is wrong in one case 
or the other. One direction in which advertis- 
ing is going is toward greater appropriateness 
of appeal. Special copy is being prepared for 
each audience. The good old days of slamming 
the same piece of copy into magazines entering, 
respectively, the front and back door of a house 
is fortunately passing. An advertiser may want 
the good will of both car owners and chauffeurs, 
but he talks to each man in his own language. 

One of the editors of a metropolitan news- 
paper was talking about his plans for reorgani- 
zation. 



242 Making Advertisements 

"We have some good actors here," he said. 
" We have some good scenery and the music is 
all right and the libretto is fair. But Goodness 
knows we haven't a show!" 

In the advertising business we have some ex- 
cellent fundamentals. We have many trust- 
worthy practises and a growing set of proved 
truths and an accumulating code of ethics. But 
Goodness knows we haven't a science. 

It's too young, this business of advertising, to 
be classed as a science. It covers the whole 
range of human emotions and is subject to every 
whim and caprice of human nature. 

Advertising men are still alive — very much 
alive, some of them — who can remember a time 
when the present ideas of agency service were 
unknown. And yet, young as advertising is, 
those who have been working with it as it has 
progressed are apt to take for granted too much 
knowledge of it on the part of the public. Much 
as it affects their lives, people haven't yet ac- 
cepted many of the most commonplace phases 
of advertising. 

At a dinner party the other evening a woman 
of broad general tastes expressed herself very 
forcibly on the subject of carrying over fiction 



Where is Advertising Going ? 243 

into the advertising pages. To advertising men 
this discussion is a very old story. Half a dozen 
years ago there were vigorous discussions on both 
sides. Many advertisers favored the carry-over 
method and many remained loyal to the solid ad- 
vertising section. Both principles have shown 
that they can make advertising pay. And yet 
here was this magazine reader opening up the 
subject as if it never had been mentioned before. 
She didn't like to hunt through the advertising 
pages for the continuation of her stories and she 
thought the practise ought to be stopped, and 
that was all there was to it! 

A couple across the table chimed in to say that 
they didn't mind having their fiction split by ad- 
vertisements, but what they disliked was seeing 
billboards along a railroad. There ought to be 
a law, they thought, to give the man uninter- 
rupted view of the Jersey marshes. Here, too, 
the subject was approached in the manner of 
pioneers. 

The other day there was a very interesting ar- 
ticle in Printer s Ink about baths. Do people 
really take a bath every day? Apparently a 
great share of our countrymen do not. One 
thing or another seems to interfere. If that is 



244 Making Advertisements 

true, why should the soap manufacturers con- 
cern themselves with advancing arguments for 
this brand of soap or that when what seems to be 
needed is an educational campaign for just soap? 
How many men put on a clean shirt and a clean 
collar every day? How many men are careful 
about keeping their shoes polished? 

In a word, there are scores of fundamentals 
about human habits toward advertising and ad- 
vertised products which most advertisers are too 
busy to consider. And why go after the market 
in the interior of South America when there are 
a dozen markets twice as big on your own door- 
step? 

In a single issue of a newspaper you will find 
advertisers in many stages of development. The 
keen, well-displayed, thoughtful advertisement 
of the seasoned manufacturer appears beside the 
old-fashioned " card " of the firm that remains 
backward. The long-pull advertisement of the 
firm that is building character over a period of 
years, the house that regards advertising as an 
investment and treats its appropriation as good- 
will insurance, is seen near the offer of the retail 
store which expects action within a few hours. 

A retailer can think of his advertising budget 



Where is Advertising Going ? 245 

in terms of weeks. He knows from experience 
that if he spends $5,000 this week he will turn 
over a greater stock so much more rapidly than 
he would without advertising that he will get 
from the public his money to pay for his adver- 
tising before his bills are due. 

An institutional advertiser has no such imme- 
diate evidence of his advertising's power. He 
must have faith sometimes for years until some 
day a test comes and he finds that his investment 
has rolled up for him a mass of good will behind 
his trademark which can be destroyed by neither 
disaster nor competition. 

The time has come when the man who employs 
one of these methods is studying the methods of 
the other and each is gaining something from 
the work that the other has done. The kind of 
advertising that Butterick has been doing will 
help to educate people to the fundamentals of ad- 
vertising itself. More campaigns explaining 
the elementary principles of advertising may be 
expected, and their value can scarcely be over- 
estimated. 

With a closer scrutiny of values in advertising 
has come a loosening of the grip held on business 
by personal salesmanship. A mediocre idea 



246 Making Advertisements 

brilliantly presented may seem plausible and 
even promising when the presentation is made 
by a dominating salesman, but when it goes be- 
fore the public without the benefit of its spon- 
sor's eloquence the promise is rarely fulfilled. 
And when this has been repeated a few times the 
advertiser thinks more of his dollars than he does 
of the charm of an eloquent salesman. With the 
disappearance of superlatives from copy has 
come a demand for quiet convincing argument 
with something more behind it than a heavy fist 
accustomed to rough work on mahogany desk 
tops. 

Magazines which cannot measure up on net 
paid circulation and net cost per subscription do 
not attract the advertising that used to be started 
in their direction at the cocktail hour. The 
great little entertainer is not nearly so entertain- 
ing as a good A. B. C. report. 

With a better understanding will come more 
intelligent use of advertising in lines of business 
where growth seems to have been stunted. When 
the banks discovered that they could advertise 
their services without loss of dignity, a new day 
began for financial institutions and the hardest 
blow in history was struck at the get-rich-quick 



Where is Advertising Going ? 247 

promoters. For advertising meant the public's 
increased interest in the handling of money, and 
with greater interest has come more knowledge 
and protection against skilful snares. 

One of the best New York agencies specializ- 
ing in financial accounts has watched the signs 
of the times and is equipping itself to sell bonds 
and banking service just as bread and spark 
plugs are sold. It used to regard the prepara- 
tion of advertising copy as something confined 
to the up-town agencies, but now it is employing 
only writers who have had general experience in 
advertising merchandise. 

When great industrial houses, such as makers 
of factory machinery and equipment, learned 
that they could afford to reach through general 
advertising the young executives of today who 
would be the chief executives of tomorrow, they 
proved the value of a new application of adver- 
tising. 

Yet there are whole industries which are still 
in the doldrums. Many of them continue year 
after year to make the same mistake: they use 
their advertising to talk about what they sell in- 
stead of talking about what their products can 
do for the people whom they want to reach. 



248 Making Advertisements 

The book publishers are a capital example. 
The opportunity of the book publishers lies in 
selling reading, not books, to the people. As a 
nation, we have lost the art of reading. One of 
the leading booksellers of the country said the 
other day that he estimated the number of book 
purchasers — consistent book purchasers — in 
this country at 200,000. Think of it! Out of 
110,000,000 less than one fifth of one per cent 
have the reading habit. 

The reason is very easy to find. Reading has 
been crowded out of the public's attention by 
the many other kinds of entertainment and 
amusement that are constantly thrust forward. 
The movies, the cheaper magazines — and, of 
course, it is assumed that the good magazines are 
included as much as books when one speaks of 
reading — and most of all the newspapers, have 
taken the place filled in a more deliberate gener- 
ation by good books. 

Reading, with the mass of people in large 
cities, has become a matter of hurriedly glancing 
at morning newspaper headlines,"-and picking 
up and throwing down the editions of evening 
papers which begin to appear right after break- 
fast. On the ride home at night another eve- 




Does Anyone ever get 
" too mucK % Sleep 



THE energy you can afford 
to spend today is just 
what you stored up last night 
in sleep-'-and no mart. 

What you need for deep, 
sound, restful sleep is a quiet, 
steady bed — a bed that in- 
vites every nerve and muscle 
to relax: 

Thousands of people are 
finding in Simmons Beds 
deep, quiet sleep for the first 
time in their lives. 



THE Simmons Metal Bed 
is noistlas. 

A Simmons Spring is al- 
ways resilient and restful— 
never sags or humps. 

That i$ why people sleep 
so much better in a Sim- 
mons Bed and Spring than in 
a wooden bed or ordinary 
metal bed. 

And that is why Simmon* 
Company is specializing in 



Twin "Bids. One sleeper 
does not disturb the other, 
or communicate colds and 
other infections. 

With the addition of Mat- 
tresses to their well-known 
Metal Beds and Springs, the 
Simmons line is the most 
popuhtcomplet'tsleepinsequip' 
ment in America today— built 
for sleep. 

Sold in the. stores of lead- 
ing merchants all over 'the 
country. 

Your choice of very beau- 
tiful designs in Enameled 
Steel and Lacquered Brass— 
at prices little if'any higher 
than for ordinary beds. 

And when you are select- 
ing your Simmons Beds with 
an eye to their appearance in 
the room, you will see that 
Simmons has for the first 
time established beautiful and 
authoritative design in Metal 
Beds. 



Sleep it a big subject f Write us far the brechvre. "What 
Leading Medical Journals and Health Magazines SfJ atoul 
Separate Beit and Sauad Sleep.' ' Fret of charge. 

SIMMONS COMPANY 

ATLANTA KENOSHA SAN FRANCISCO 



The "WINDSOR- 
NO. 4368— In Twin Pair 

Mi it of Simmons" extra-grade Brase Tithing- 
et heavy gauge; ensuring freedom from denting, 
great strength and rigidity. 

Exquisitely finished in Lacquer. 

Has. the Simmons patented pressed steel Xtiu* 
Lit Ow L-h. Easy rolling omen. 

Your choice of Twin Pair and Double Wukt, 
Soestallr pleasing in Twiu l**r. 




SIMMONS BEDS 

Built for Sleep 



How much stronger it was for the Simmons Company to sell Sleep than 
to use its space to harp on those three old stand-bys — materials^ workman- 
ship and price! 



250 Making Advertisements 

ning paper is scanned as the train or car lurches 
around corners. Even if sustained newspaper 
reading is done, what does the reader get? 

For the past few months six out of seven front 
page columns have been given over to industrial 
unrest. It's not the fault of the newspapers. 
The reds and the strikers have made the news. 
The newspapers have printed it. They can't 
print stories about factories where contented 
workers are steadily keeping at the jobs. That 
is not news. How would it look if you saw on 
your front page a headline reading, " Perfect 
Contentment Reigns in Bridgeport Factories!" 

The newspaper reader would say " Huh ! what 
of it? " He wants thrills, battle, murder and 
sudden death. 

Only a newspaper with features of the maga- 
zine type or with a brilliant editorial page can 
give a reader more than a reflection of the un- 
common things done by common people or the 
common things done by uncommon people. 
Uncommon people do so few uncommon things. 
And the common things done by common people 
are not news. 

And right there lies the duty of the book pub- 
lisher. There are probably 90,000,000 Ameri- 



Where is Advertising Going? 251 

cans who don't want strikes. But they are not so 
vocal as those who do. The result is that the 
small minority monopolizes our front pages. 
Why should labor agitators start papers of their 
own? They have appropriated the self-respect- 
ing press by virtue of the news that they create. 

Book publishers have been trying to sell books, 
and almost without exception they will tell you 
that their experience has not been satisfactory. 
They have been setting aside five hundred dol- 
lars or five thousand or fifteen thousand for the 
advertising of this book or that one. 

Then they take small space, prominently dis- 
play the author's name if he is popular or the 
book's name if he isn't, add a sentence or two 
quoted from favorable book reviews and call it 
an advertisement. 

What earthly difference does it make whether 
the Philadelphia Ledger says, " Rattling good 
yarn," or the Rochester Democrat declares, 
" No finer piece of work has come from Miss 
Killkenny's pen " ? 

Would your wife buy a new soup if she knew 
nothing about it except the looks of the container 
and if some soup critic merely said, " Very tasty, 
indeed " ? 



252 Making Advertisements 

Not on your trade-marked success ! She buys 
the new soup because the soupmaker sells appe- 
tite. Husband will smack his lips when he 
tramps in on a frosty winter night and finds a 
spicy plate of soup smoking-hot on the dinner 
table. 

How have the player-piano people and the 
phonograph people put their products into the 
amazing number of homes in which you find 
them today? By selling mahogany cases la- 
belled with the maker's name? Not much! By 
selling music. 

The book publishers must go behind the offer- 
ing stage — and sell. They must create a want 
of which the public isn't conscious and then fill 
it. 

How? Well, here are some random sugges- 
tions. 

The sales methods applied to business books 
are a conspicuous exception. They are sold by 
making a man realize that there is something 
lacking in his equipment — something which a 
course of training can supply. 

In only one or two instances is culture sold as 
business training is sold today. Do you ever get 
tired of the conversation in your circle of 



Where is Advertising Going? 253 

friends? What is talked about? Suppose you 
live in the suburbs. After you have covered the 
children and the new people in the community, 
how much money So-and-So is making, what 
scores you all make at golf, what new car you 
are going to buy, how the tax rate and the cost 
of living are going up, the new plays, the world's 
series, who has had trouble about maids, your 
garden, the dinner where somebody was very 
amusing, and the change in the time-tables — 
what else is left? It varies in different com- 
munities, but the range is not apt to be greater. 
Run it up and down the social scale and only 
the subjects will change. The people who talk 
or think about things more important than these 
are hard to find. 

Suppose more publishers did as only one or two 
are doing now — the one or two who are selling 
culture by mail-order advertising, where results 
are closely checked and every piece of copy must 
pay. Suppose they sold reading as a force in 
national life, a force for culture and breadth of 
vision and information. How well informed 
are most people now when they toss off an 
opinion on a really vital issue and toss it off with 
as much assurance as if they had really dug out 



254 Making Advertisements 

the facts? Suppose the publishers stuck to it 
until they made a real dent in the conventional 
habit of letting somebody else do the thinking. 
Suppose it actually became fashionable to know 
instead of to guess, and to know about something 
worth while instead of restricting one's store of 
facts to a superficial knowledge of things that do 
not matter a continental. Could people, in the 
mass, be swayed this way and that as readily as 
they are today? 

Or, again, suppose the publishers sold the joy 
of a crackling open fire, a wing arm chair, a 
fragrant pipe, a shaded light — and a Stevenson 
novel. Suppose Dickens were brought out 
afresh at the holidays and the charm and laugh- 
ter and quaintness of English inns and stage- 
coach days were put in place of Freddy Rasp- 
bury's latest appeal to sex. 

Why should the publishers feel that new 
books, however poor, must always be brought 
out to supersede old books, however good? If 
a book is sound and true and fine, why stop ad- 
vertising it as soon as only 5,000 people have 
bought it when perhaps 50,000 would buy it if 
they got around to hearing about it? 

When you go into a book shop today you 



Where is Advertising Going ? 255 

probably get a flash of recognition as you name 
the book you want, for the people you meet in 
bookshops rank high in education and intelli- 
gence ; but almost always the clerk returns with 
your book and asks: " Is there anything else?" 

As a useful public service, why shouldn't the 
purchaser be interested in another book? Good 
books on worth while subjects are being written 
constantly. The publishers say they don't sell. 
Why on earth should they? Nobody hears 
about them unless a friend happens to speak 
about one or unless he happens to run across a 
review which really says something — not the 
blurbs used in publishers' advertising but the 
inviting descriptions which sometimes creep into 
the book pages, especially when Heywood 
Broun's name is at the top of the column. 

Buying a book is an effort for most people. 
Why doesn't some bookseller make it easy? 
Why doesn't some bookseller ask his regular 
customers to let him send them one good book 
every month? If they didn't like the looks of 
what he sent, the books could be returned. The 
houses selling books by mail find that a mighty 
small share of sets sent on approval are ever re- 
turned. People keep them and pay for them. 



256 Making Advertisements 

Suppose the men and women in book-shops 
studied the types of their customers and men- 
tally classified each person as he approached. 
After his wants were supplied suppose the clerk 
used the methods that are employed by sales- 
people in the best of the Fifth Avenue shops 
where jewelry and furs and other luxuries are 
sold. A man goes into one of those shops intend- 
ing to have his watch regulated or to have a rip 
in his fur coat sewed up and he comes out with 
a platinum dinner ring for his wife or a scarf 
and muff for his daughter. The trouble is that 
books are sold like necessities. They are: but 
they ought to be sold like luxuries — persua- 
sively. 

There is enough good sound common sense 
and valuable information on the bookshelves of 
any American city to knock the menace of radi- 
calism into a cocked hat. But it is a secret 
among book publishers. 

Strangely enough, magazines and newspaper 
publishers as a class are almost as backward. 
There are a few shining exceptions — publishers 
who have built and are continuing to build sound 
reputations, a constant following among readers, 
and a sustained patronage from advertisers; but 



Where is Advertising Going ? 257 

you can count them on the fingers of both hands 
without using your thumbs. 

Most publishers of periodicals know a lot 
about advertising. They teach their own repre- 
sentatives to go out and sell space constructively 
to the manufacturers of the country. And this 
knowledge leads them, at stated intervals, to 
draw up and consider some very workmanlike 
advertising plans. But when it comes to putting 
into practise the ideas which they habitually lay 
before manufacturers — ideas which they know 
to be successful if they read their own advertis- 
ing pages — they pause on the brink, shudder, 
and decide that the water is too cold. 

Publishers are not alone in backwardness. 
There are other industries which might be de- 
scribed. The reason that publishers are men- 
tioned is that they are so close to advertising 
that they ought to know it better, and their op- 
portunity is so obviously worth while. 

The increased use of some commodities might 
have debatable value to the country, but the in- 
creased use of books could have but one result. 

It is doubtful whether any publisher could go 
very far alone. The great need is for a broad, 
unselfish, cooperative campaign as intelligently 



258 Making Advertisements 

planned and faithfully executed as the collective 
campaigns of the citrous fruit growers of the 
West, the florists, the lumber people and more 
recently the railway executives, the canners and 
— yes, the churches of the country. 

Advertising in the next few years will see 
many more campaigns of common interest un- 
less all the signs fail. There is a marked tend- 
ency among institutions of many sorts to say: 

" Here we have a story too big for any one of 
us to tell alone. Anything that benefits one of 
us will benefit us all. The public has never been 
told what barriers we have surmounted, what 
accomplishments we have reached. Let's not 
boast; let's explain." 

There is much to be said for the collective 
campaign. It offers an opportunity to speak 
for a whole industry and many a man will per- 
mit his industry to describe a situation of which 
he alone would hesitate to speak. The burden 
is carried on many shoulders and there is prog- 
ress without individual hardship. 

If one fruit grower were to spend a few cents 
per crate in single-handed advertising, he 
wouldn't spread his story far beyond his own 
door-yard. He would be in the position of the 



Where is Advertising Going ? 259 

retailer before the day national advertising 
helped to make any real impression upon the 
public's buying habits. But several thousand 
fruit growers, pooling their few cents per crate, 
can make a market. And the opportunity which 
has been realized by the cooperative few will be 
seized in coming years by many more industries. 

The other day some advertising men were 
wondering how far this cooperative trend would 
go. Why should it be limited to merchants in 
one line of business? Some one recalled a time 
a few years ago when a pancake flour maker and 
a sirup manufacturer shared the same billboard. 
That led to the suggestion that some day an enter- 
prising agency might produce a triplet cam- 
paign for a razor manufacturer, a shaving brush 
maker and a shaving soap firm. In the present 
campaigns of each one of these three advertisers 
the products of the other two are shown — un- 
labeled, it is true, but shown just the same to 
help tell the story. Why not label them? 

The idea suggests interesting possibilities. 
Why shouldn't a man's hat, collar, tie, suit, 
gloves and shoes be advertised in one advertise- 
ment — each one a trademarked product iden- 
tified instead of merely helping to supply the 



260 Making Advertisements 

background? Think of an automobile adver- 
tisement with everything labelled from top to 
tires. 

When one firm makes several products it fre- 
quently advertises two or more in the same piece 
of copy. Why shouldn't the same policy be 
followed when the products are made by differ- 
ent firms? 

Even granting that an equitable division of 
prominence, satisfactory to both or all, could be 
obtained, there is another objection which is 
probably responsible for the absence of such 
advertising. So great is the power of associa- 
tion of ideas through advertising that an adver- 
tiser will be loath always to show his product 
with one certain product in another line lest the 
public come to think that his product could be 
used with that one and no other. The razor 
maker wants his razor used with all manner of 
brushes and shaving soap. Why should he limit 
the public's conception to only one? And there 
you are. 

Yet it is possible that this fear of what the 
public might think may follow many other buga- 
boos which have been sent to oblivion in recent 
years. It used to be generally believed that the 



Where is Advertising Going? 261 

only safe way for a manufacturer to tell his story 
was to gef a newspaper to give him a write-up. 
He was perfectly willing to pay a press agent al- 
most anything to get something into the papers 
about himself. Today the use of free publicity 
is being confined more and more to telling the 
legitimate news of an undertaking. And adver- 
tising is being used when a firm or an institution 
wants to go squarely before the public with an 
idea. 

Standards of advertising judgment are becom- 
ing more definitely fixed. With the increasing 
number of capable men who are devoting them- 
selves to typography and with the trend of good 
artists toward advertising illustration, it is in- 
evitable that there will be more schools of com- 
mercial designing. Reasons for arrangement 
will be better understood and advertisers will 
not be so quick to say, " I don't like that; I don't 
know why, but I just don't." 

A little knowledge is just as dangerous in the 
criticism of designs as it is in the criticism of 
copy. When it is understood that there is a 
syntax of design and that certain rules govern 
arrangement and that these rules are not to be 
violated by the free-hand use of shears and paste, 



262 Making Advertisements 

much will have been accomplished toward clean- 
ing up the looks of the advertising pages. 

Already the advocates of deliberately bad 
grammar in advertising are disappearing. 
There was a brief vogue for the type of copy 
which looked as if it had been clawed out of 
stone by some one with his naked hands. Its 
chief enthusiasts claimed for it the ring of sin- 
cerity, which it frequently possessed. But that 
was its sole virtue. 

"Never mind grammar — get results!" was 
the exhortation of this school of copy writers. 

Every writer of advertising has received the 
condolences of his friends for not being allowed 
to write what he really wants to express. Yet 
mighty few w r riters of advertising can say that 
anybody ever told them not to write so well. 

Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of the 
New York Times, complains that people often 
say to him : " It must be very trying not to be 
able to write as you like — to be limited by the 
policy of your paper." It annoys him because 
he says he has never been told how to write and 
he is writing the best he knows how! 

Advertising today is attracting writers of 
greater ability than ever before. It is attracting 



dr 



Advertising agents have 
grown with advertising 



The Philadelphia manufacturer who 
enters upoo advertising now can do SO 
with an assurance of success greater 
than has ever before been possible. 

The pioneering has been done for 
ttfft* 

Yearsof constant activity tod steady 
progress have made every factor in ad* 
vertising more effective, more certain. 

The leading publications today open 
up a more intensive market, with cir- 
culations that can be traced and meas- 
ured/with an influence that is known 
«nd established. 

Readers are lending a. keener atten- 
tion to tbe advertising pages. 

Merchants realize better the power 
«f advertising and are swayed by it. 

Salesmen know how to grasp it and 
flpply it to their own selling program. 

And the men who execute advertis- 
ing -the advertising agents— are mora 
capable than ever. 

They .have behind them yean of 



The universal speeding-up ot com- 
petition has. driven home to them * 
deeper appreciation of what must bo 
done in order to make advertising pay* 

They have seen and shared in the 
development of huge selling campaign* 
in one field after another. They have 
faced new problems and overcome them 
■with new methods. 

They have trained themselves to 
apply to one industry the lessons learned 
in another. They have concerned 
themselvesnot only -with sales, but with 
every department, of the modem buair 



The advertising agent therefore k 
today in a better position than ever not 
only to fortify against mistakes "and 
eliminate risk, but to render practical, 

constructive help in building a solid, 
structure of commercial 



A* the volume and the importance 
Of advertising have grown, the agents 
have grown. The demands it has made 
upon them have, added to their equip* 
meat, widened their scope- 



There .\te in Philadelphia, as in 
other important center*, advertising 
•genu who are thus skilled^andthrougb 
whom the Philadelphia manufacturer 
may command the accumulated «x« 
perience and momentum Of t i 
of gdv*xti*i&g> 



THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 



mUdUS Horn* /eunai. Tht Saturday &Mf« Pott Tb* Catotfrp ftnftMC 



When Richard Walsh, now of Barrows & Richardson, was with Curtis 
he produced a lot of remarkable copy — particularly his series about the 
place of Advertising in American business. This was one of that series* 



264 Making Advertisements 

artists of high technique. It is producing a new 
type of intellectual, cultured business man. 

It is developing organizations with the spirit 
that once existed in newspaper offices of the tra- 
ditional sort where friendships lasted and men 
felt affection for the desks and the walls. 

There is pride in the work that is done within 
these organizations. There are standards that 
must be kept, codes that must be observed and 
reputations that must be built. 

It has been proved in advertising that the 
agency which succeeds is the one which devotes 
its energies to producing the most valuable serv- 
ice for its customers. If profits are the first 
consideration, this service suffers. If the service 
is put ahead of everything else, the profits take 
care of themselves. Already advertising is old 
enough to have demonstrated that. 

The men who are successfully administering 
the expenditure of millions for advertising every 
year see that very clearly. They realize what 
a privilege it is to have a part in these first years 
of advertising. And they are determined that 
before they give up their share in its develop- 
ment it will be that most thoroughly American of 
institutions — a business that is a profession. 

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